Using the tools of science and psychology to deepen your spiritual growth.
Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.
59: Who’s in Charge?
Edition #59: Inside the Invisible
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Today, I would like to explore who is in charge of this God business we have been discussing. This topic can be boiled down to a single word – authority. Who has the authority to call the shots? And on what basis do they have this authority? And over what do they have authority? These are critical issues that have bedeviled the early church and bedevil us to this day.
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Fundamentalist Christians assert that God is in charge. They further claim that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and the means by which God’s authority is exercised in the world. Apparently, they haven’t read their Bibles very well, because they haven’t addressed or explained the many places where Scripture appears to contradict itself.
Essentially, this is a lazy answer to the question of authority. Rather than wrestle with the genuine questions of authority, their answer is to simply “believe.” This response has led to a dependence on the transcendent view of God and typically denies the loving-kindness of the imminent God.
Of course, fundamentalists are not alone in adhering to the transcendent view. Christians of all stripes – the Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, various Protestant denominations, and the evangelicals – emphasize, at times exclusively, this transcendent view. This is a profound theological error with a host of negative consequences!
Can you have “up” without “down?” Can you have “left” without “right?” To play with words a little, can you have “right” without “wrong?” Of course not! Within the phenomenal, dualistic world, things come to us in pairs. We cannot accurately speak of one half of the equation without considering the other. And this is what the Church has done since its inception. It has only looked at half of the truth.
It is correct to say that God is in charge. The error arises when the only view of God is that of the transcendent God. In this view, God created the world and humanity and left us to our own devices. We will be judged by this God after we die, and, depending on the number of brownie points we have accumulated, this will determine where we will spend eternity.
* * *
The Gospel of Thomas and, to a lesser extent, the Gospel of John, present a very different view of authority. Here God is not separated into transcendent and immanent parts. Instead of the dualism inherent in the phenomenal world, these gospels assert that Reality is whole; that humanity is a constituent part of the larger Reality and cannot be fundamentally separated from it.
In this view, our ignorance is the fundamental problem. We are ignorant of the Divine within us, and we are ignorant of the divine context in which we live and move. We don’t realize that our essential being is part of the Divine Being.
Take a moment and reflect on that last sentence. It means that God dwells within you and within each one of us. Once we realize this, all external forms of authority simply collapse. The ultimate authority already exists within us, so there is no need for any external authority. That said, we are sadly ignorant of this Truth within ourselves.
From this perspective, our task as spiritual beings is to overcome our ignorance. There is no Original Sin that condemns us. Our God does not condemn us. Jesus, Krishna, and the Buddha do not condemn us. Instead, they invite us to learn from them; they invite us to overcome our ignorant beliefs; and they invite us to experience the fullness of our being, which just so happens to be the fullness of the Divine.
Once you understand and experience this fullness, no external authority has power over you. No external authority can rightly tell you what to do. No external authority can tell you what is ethical and what is not. In this view, inner transformation precedes ethics.
Please note that this does not mean that ethics and morality are unimportant or unnecessary. Countless millennia of human experience tell us that our morality is very important. Without it, our social order collapses. But the question to ask is, “For whom is morality important?” Once again, let’s turn to the person of Jesus and the record of his actions.
Let’s look at Jesus’s actions with the man born blind, described in John 9.1-41. Here, Jesus restores the sight of a man born blind, but the Pharisees excoriate him for doing so on the Sabbath. Because healing is considered to be work, and work, according to Jewish law, is forbidden on the Sabbath, clearly Jesus was in error and could not be a prophet of God. (The viciousness of this application of the law never ceases to astound me! Can you imagine denying the healing of a blind man because it happened on the wrong day?)
Jesus here is acting from the deepest morality – the morality of love and the recognition that we are all connected, that we are all part of one another and God. Having experienced this inner transformation – that his being is an intimate part of the Father’s being – Jesus knew that there was a deeper morality than that expressed in the Jewish law. His inner transformation resulted in a profound deepening in his moral behavior.
Incidents of this nature are recorded again and again in the Gospels. Jesus touches lepers, consorts with tax collectors, and allows a bleeding woman to touch him. He allows his disciples to pick and eat grain on the Sabbath. Over and over again, he is reprioritizing the Law, stating that human need triumphs over ritual restrictions. Again and again, he prioritizes loving one another over everything else.
This is both the most profound morality and the most difficult to implement. But remember, it is only difficult for those of us who still walk in ignorance. For those who have learned their true nature as part of the Divine, this is just normal behavior. It is unremarkable.
* * *
So, let’s go back to the institutions of the Church, the ones that tell us what we should do and what we should not do. For one who has realized her true nature, there is no need for an institutional authority. Authority flows naturally from within because you are already aware of the mind of God. You know what God wants from you. You are fully prepared to act in accordance with the will of God.
For a person such as this, the Church's authority is both unnecessary and superfluous.
So how might the exercise of this kind of authority look in the world in which we live? I had breakfast this morning with a priest friend, Father Mark. He described to me how the Ethiopian Orthodox Church chooses their bishops. All the bishops get together and discuss who would be the best candidate, that is, who best exemplifies the spiritual teachings of Jesus. These discussions continue until a consensus of the three best candidates is reached. Each name is written on a slip of paper, placed in a chalice, and prayed over. Then the youngest bishop blindly chooses one of the three slips of paper and reveals the name of the man who will be consecrated.
Contrast this with how the bishops in my own church, the Episcopal Church, are chosen. Or contrast it with the selection of a new pope. In both cases, political factions within these churches put forward their own candidates and agendas, and battle back and forth. After considerable political wrangling, a new primate is chosen. It is rare for a candidate to be chosen for their spiritual depth. Almost universally, the choice is a political one based on considerations that often have little to do with spiritual development or God.
The contrast between these two methods is stunning, isn’t it? In the case of the Ethiopian church, the focus is on spiritual qualifications, and the blind drawing provides an opportunity for the Holy Spirit to make the actual choice. In the case of the two Western churches, the focus is on political alliances and agendas. With the Ethiopian church, there is room for the Holy Spirit to guide the choice. With the Western churches, it is the political Pooh-Bahs rather than God who do the choosing.
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. So ask yourself this: who would you prefer to have calling the shots? A bunch of political hacks or the Holy Spirit?
* * *
Well, I suspect I have said enough in this newsletter to get an angry letter from my bishop and possible charges levied against me for heresy. Oh well, maybe Jesus will love me anyway.
In the meantime, please remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Take some time to let go of your thinking, to let go of all the busyness in your life, and just BE. The promise is this: when we find our own being, we enter into the Being of God, and, in the process, we realize that the Kingdom is truly within us.
Rest in the loving embrace of our Lord! Let his loving-kindness bring you to your deepest fulfillment!
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
58: The Nature of God
Edition #58: Inside the Invisible
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Most people think about theology, if they think about it at all, as the study of God. This is simply a mistake. Theology is not just about God; it’s about how our finite minds construct and encounter claims about the Infinite. There are two streams of thought in this regard, and we will explore each in turn.
The stream of theological thought called cataphatic theology seeks to understand the Divine through concepts and words. In this approach, God is described by using analogies: “God is good, wise, just, etc.” It is a theology of affirmation, but this approach has a serious drawback. The problem is that it easily reduces God to a series of concepts, and this verges on idolatry. It takes us away from the actual experience of the Divine, and we get lost in concepts instead.
Apophatic theology takes the opposite approach. Instead of describing what God is, an apophatic theologian will describe what God is not. This approach begins with the understanding that God is beyond all our knowing and, consequently, it is better to say nothing. The problem with this approach is that it easily slides into vagueness or nihilism.
What both traditions have in common is the assumption that God exceeds the capabilities of our ordinary means of understanding. Both approaches understand the limits of language, and both aim at transformation, not just information. Both agree that God is beyond language. Where they disagree is what to do about it.
* * *
With this conceptual framework, let me share my understanding of the Divine. I am not trying to convince you to see things my way; instead, I want you to understand the bias I’m coming from.
Every approach that uses words to describe the Divine is, in my view, ultimately erroneous. That is not to say that we shouldn’t try, but rather to understand the limitations inherent in our language. The problem is simple: all language is based on dualistic thinking. There is an “I” over here that perceives an “object” over there. Language begins by splitting the deep unity of our experience, and because most of our experience is mediated by language, this split usually occurs outside our awareness, in the unconscious mind.
Before language gives us duality, there is an undivided state – a unitive awareness. In this non-dual awareness, there is simply a “beingness.” We typically experience this non-dual awareness at least twice a day. The first time is just after we wake up from sleep. There is a space between waking and being conscious of one’s self as a separate entity.
The second time we typically experience non-duality is as we drift off to sleep. There is a moment where we let go of our “self.” In this moment, the too-narrow constraints of self dissolve, and one’s being extends into eternity and into Infinity. (You will notice, I hope, that while I prefer the apophatic way of speaking, I am forced to use language and analogy to point at the actual experience of God. Both approaches are necessary, and they both fall far short of an adequate description.)
You’ll notice that I haven’t yet talked about Jesus, about the Trinity, about Krishna or Buddha, or any of the usual terms that are employed when talking about God. In my experience, these labels follow after the direct experience of the Divine. The usual labels are language-based and thus fall within the dualistic realm. As such, they can never accurately describe the non-dual experience.
You will also notice that I typically use the term “non-dual” rather than “unitive.” On the surface, it appears that these two terms are referring to the same thing, but there is a subtle distortion in the term “unitive.” The term gives lie to itself because it implies that a separate “thing” exists, a unitive thing. Once again, we have fallen into the dualistic trap entailed by languaging.
So, what is this non-dual Reality that I keep referring to? Perhaps the most basic description is to label it, “All-That-Is.” This Reality is sentient and loving. It is not just connected with all that is; it actually is All-That-Is. It has been an intimate part of our lives since the very beginning. It holds you and me and all parts of Itself in equal esteem. It offers guidance to Itself and seems to be steering humanity towards a particular end.
Divinity is impartial, non-judgmental, and goes beyond our limited ideas of good and evil, right and wrong. It grants each of its parts the freedom to act or not, as that part chooses, and it holds everyone in the embrace of unconditional Love. This Love is an inclusive field that rejects no one. One experiences Its presence as an exquisite, all-encompassing reality. It is deeply gentle yet infinitely powerful.
Because the Divine is All-That-Is, it sees all and knows all and radiates an infinite field of power. Everything naturally aligns with this power. It exists both within and outside of time and space, and when we experience this Presence, it is unmistakable. We recognize its Presence by virtue of experiencing that same Presence within ourselves. That is to say, at our deepest level, we are one with that Presence.
Having said this, we stand in the midst of several wild paradoxes. First, despite our longing and our many attempts, we cannot comprehend the Infinite by means of our finite cognition. Further, we cannot use language without distorting the Reality language is attempting to describe. Further still, we cannot conceptualize the Divine without reducing that Reality to a point where it becomes unrecognizable. In other words, we cannot contain God with our ideas.
And that brings us to the question: how can we move forward from this place?
* * *
The short answer is this: we move forward when our primary data source shifts from inherited concepts to direct, structured experience. That is, when we “feel it in our bones.” Right about then, we are experiencing the Divine directly. Once you've had an experience of this nature, it is unmistakable!
It’s not about feeling something intense. It’s not about rejecting doctrine and all the concepts about the Divine and the spiritual life we have inherited. It’s not about using “mystical” language. It’s an experience far deeper.
As I see it, there are three criteria that must be met simultaneously for us to experience the Divine directly. First, there is an epistemic shift. Knowledge is no longer about God; it becomes immediate, direct awareness. Instead of representational concepts like “God is good,” we realize that words cease to have any power to explain. The meaning of the experience resides within the experience itself. Sadly, most spiritual seekers stop here. They are still trapped in a dualistic framework and have not yet broken through to the direct and immediate experience of the Divine.
The second criterion is that this experience is stable. Instead of being a feeling that comes and goes, or something that varies, this experience is always present. You may choose not to notice it; you may choose to lose yourself in some other experience. But every time you direct your awareness to the depths within, it becomes present to you in a way that is instantly recognizable.
Third, the experience arises prior to interpretation, and is not borrowed from prior concepts such as Scripture or tradition. Prior concepts necessarily distort our experience. For example, if you feel stillness during a meditation, the tendency is to label it as “God’s presence,” because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. You haven’t yet entered into direct experience; your ideas and concepts still stand between you and it.
There is an interesting twist in this kind of experience. Many genuine mystics have authentic spiritual experiences, but they still describe them using inherited theological frameworks. For example, one might say, “This feels like union.” While the experience may be genuine, the language distorts it significantly and impedes the seeker's progress.
Genuine mystical experience is not constructed out of prior knowledge. It is not recognized through analogy. It is not confirmed by memory. It doesn’t arrive as: “This matches X teaching.”
Instead, the knowing appears before thought. It precedes languaging and concepts. It has a self-validating, independent authority. It doesn’t require validation from Scripture, from teachers, or from any prior beliefs. They are simply irrelevant to the actual experience.
Finally, these experiences don’t point to something else. They are self-evident and self-validating.
Many, perhaps most, spiritual seekers think that they’re having direct insight. In actual fact, they are simply matching a pattern they have experienced against an internalized theology. This does not lead to enlightenment; it is simply high-speed interpretation.
* * *
Looking back on all the words I’ve written, I find myself giggling. For a guy who prefers not to talk about these things and the guy who distrusts his own words, I certainly have scribbled out a lot of them today. And here I thought I was going to talk about the Trinity. So much for my mighty plans!
Again, thank you for your patience and for working through this material with me. I deeply appreciate your willingness to travel these roads with me. As I write, I have a very clear sense of your presence out there, just beyond the limits of my perception. Your presence sustains me in ways you might not fully realize, and I am deeply grateful.
Please remember to set aside time every day for at least five minutes (or more!) of meditation and quiet reflection. Ultimately, our willingness to travel into our own depths will determine how close we come to the everlasting Truth.
May you rest in God’s love every moment of this week!
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
57: The Two Faces of God
Edition #57: Inside the Invisible
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Today, I would like to take a break from our focus on church history and look at some of the consequences that flow from our examination. In particular, I would like to focus on the two major ways we experience God: as the transcendent Creator who stands above and apart from all things, and as the imminent Lover of souls, who stands with us in every moment. I have briefly explored this in my third newsletter, but now that we have a more substantial background together, we can go much deeper.
The Transcendent God
First, let’s explore the transcendent dimension of the Divine, because this is probably the God that you are most familiar with. It is the God typically proclaimed in most Christian churches, and while it is accurate as far as it goes, it is partial and incomplete. Because it describes only a part of the Divine nature, it must be considered erroneous unless it includes a description of the imminent dimension of God.
The transcendent God is understood to have created all that Is. This is the God who, in the book of Genesis, said, “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” After creation, the transcendent God appears to have left its creation, and believers are promised that they will meet this God again after their death.
Of note, this aspect of God is understood to be both judgmental and punitive. The various religions of the world – both in Christendom and beyond – have catalogued quite a list of transgressions and have described, often in gory detail, the punishments that go with each transgression.
Within Christianity, these transgressions are labeled as sin. The Western Churches have declared that the fundamental truth about humanity is the universality of our sin. This was enshrined in Christian doctrine by St. Augustine, who was the first to clearly formulate the doctrine of Original Sin.
In this view, all humanity is condemned because of the sin of Adam. Because Adam was disobedient to God, he was condemned to leave the idyllic Garden of Eden forever. He is also condemned to work hard all of his life, and his partner, Eve, was condemned to the pain of childbirth. For both, sexual intercourse is seen as sinful and the vehicle through which their original error is passed on to future generations.
Because of this notion of Original Sin, we in the Western churches have concluded that we ourselves are bad; that we are inherently defective. From this, it follows that only God can heal us from our terrible sin and from our inherently rotten human nature.
This account of the relation between God and humanity carries a striking and little-noticed parallel. After creation, the transcendent God appears to separate from his creation, not to be seen again until after we die. In a similar way, humanity appears to be separated from God because of this Original Sin. (So, in effect, human beings are just copying God’s separation from humanity! LOL) We have the mistaken idea that a vast abyss separates us from God because of our inherent defectiveness. In this view, only God can heal us and repair the separation that divides us. Further, our inherent separation from both God and Creation can only be repaired for those who are obedient children of the Divine.
And who decides what obedience looks like? Why, the authorities of the church, of course! And this is where the church's authoritarian structure has corrupted itself. I’m reminded of that wretched quotation from Lord Acton, who said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Just as power corrupts in the political sphere, it also corrupts in the religious sphere as well. The flagrant instances of religious corruption are apparent to us all. Pastor Jimmy Swaggart, with his hellfire and damnation sermons and his repeated dalliance with prostitutes. Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and their wild and fraudulent timeshare schemes. Joel Olstein and his many imitators preaching the gospel of prosperity. Yeah, it’s prosperous all right. It’s prosperous for Joel, who tells folks to send him their money, but it’s not so prosperous for everyone else.
And so, we have, in a shameless display, the corruption that dogs even the highest-minded religious pursuits! It’s enough to make you barf. And when innocents who are stirred by God to begin the spiritual quest see these scandalous goings-on, what are they likely to conclude? Yeah…
The Imminent God
Unlike the transcendent view of God, God's immanence is beautifully illustrated through the person of Jesus. This aspect of the Divine feels close and personal. It is the God who stands with us during our trials and struggles. This is the God who understands how hard it is to be human – how tough it is to have one desire pulling you in one direction and another pulling you in the opposite direction.
This is the God who loves us, understands us, and walks with us through “the valley of the shadow of death.” This is the God who never leaves our side, constantly whispering encouragement and guidance.
There is never a word of condemnation here. This is the God who describes Himself in the story of the Prodigal Son. The selfish son demands his inheritance and then squanders it. Finally, realizing that even his father’s servants are better off than he is, he decides to go home and ask his father to accept him as a servant. When the father sees his son returning, he throws a big homecoming celebration because the child who was lost is now found, and the one who has died has come back to life.
So, you might ask, how does this imminent God handle sin? How does he address our daily feeling that we are somehow broken or flawed?
When thinking about the notion of sin, it’s instructive to look at Jesus's actual words. He doesn’t ignore our wrongdoings or mistakes. The word Jesus used, translated as ‘sin,’ is hamartia. Hamartia is a military term that describes the distance between the center of the bull’s-eye and where your arrow or spear lands. Hamartia was translated from Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written, into Latin as ‘sin.’ Like many English words, the word ‘sin’ was simply borrowed from Latin and plopped down into English. Over time, the meaning of our English word ‘sin’ has drifted far from its original military meaning.
The best one-word translation of hamartia/sin is ‘separation.’ Separation is the English word that best describes the distance between the bull’s-eye and where your projectile landed. Thus, when Jesus refers to people as ‘sinners,’ he means that they are separated: separated from their neighbor, separated from their own innermost self, and always, separated from God.
Notice the vast difference here between the doctrine of Original Sin, which condemns all humanity for someone else’s wrongdoing, and the notion of sin as expressed by Jesus, the imminent dimension of God. One is condemning and punitive; the other is gentle and suggests, by its very nature, the remedy.
And what is the remedy for separation? Using the metaphor described in the Prodigal Son, the remedy is to return home. The remedy is for us to turn away from the self-centered behaviors that have separated us from our Father. There is no condemnation here, or threat of punishment if we don’t return. There is, however, an acknowledgment of the error.
There is a clear recognition that our selfish actions have caused our disastrous separation from the Divine. By following our own desires, we have hidden the essential unity that connects us all. And the essence of that unity? The essence—universally desired by all humankind—is love and acceptance. This is the splendor of the imminence of God – that, no matter what we do or how deeply separated we are, the love God has for us is never diminished!
Given the glorious and universally-desired nature of love, you have to ask yourself, how did we get separated in the first place? What happened that we turned our backs on God, on our neighbor, and on our own deepest desires to be loved and cherished?
Let’s go back to the Prodigal Son for the answer. Why did the younger son ask for his inheritance and leave his father? He did so because he wanted to live the ‘high life.’ He aimed to be the Jeff Bezos of his time; the Elon Musk of the ancient world. He believed that being a big spender would earn him the love and acceptance he craved. The problem with this idea is that people don’t love the big spender for who he is; they love him for his money. And like all finite resources, money eventually runs out.
From this example, we can conclude that separation is essentially due to ignorance. The prodigal son believed he could buy love. He lacked the experience to understand that true love can never be bought with money.
We can push this line of thinking even further. If our ‘sin’ results from ignorance, then our salvation depends on understanding the implicit unity that connects all creation. In this perspective, salvation cannot be achieved through good behavior or deeds. It can only be realized as we come to see the unity that links God to Creation.
For most of you who are reading this, this is a radically different notion from everything you have been taught. While ethics and morality are important in the imminent view of God, they are not the central feature. There is no earning ‘brownie points’ for being a good person or for doing good deeds. You do the good deeds as a reflection of the unity you feel with God and creation. The more you understand this, the more imperative your moral behavior becomes.
Another crucial difference centers around the importance of belief. In the transcendent view of God, belief is all-important. In this view, your belief about the nature of God and the proper role of humanity constitute the guardrails that can keep you on the ‘straight and narrow.’ This leads to the mistaken notion that believing in the right way leads to salvation.
In my view, this is a remarkable mistake! It’s remarkable because, on the face of it, it is simply ridiculous. I can believe all I want that I have a million dollars, but my belief doesn’t make it so. I can believe that I am the most handsome and charming man in the known universe, but my belief doesn’t make it so. In fact, in this latter case, we have all met people who have believed they are very special and above everyone else. We typically view these people as sad specimens of the human race. The only place they are special is in their own mistaken minds.
From the imminent view of God, we are saved as we recognize our unity with the Divine. This recognition is not dependent on a church or any kind of external structure. It is not dependent on external authorities. Instead, salvation depends on us: 1) on our seeing and understanding the nature of our separation, 2) on our learning about our essential unity with God, and, as a result, 3) on our experiencing the essential and underlying unity that binds us to the Divine.
As you might imagine, learning all of this is far easier said than done. Ultimately, it involves a deep dive into non-duality, the actual experience of oneness with All-That-Is. To address this, my team and I are hard at work designing a website to facilitate this deep dive. I’ll keep you updated on the details as we get closer to the release date.
For now, it’s enough to notice that the imminent view of God has not been very well described by most of the theologies that arose following Christ’s execution. Of the four original schools of thought, this view of God is best embodied by the Gospel of Thomas. And, as you will recall, Thomas was universally suppressed by the Church, to the point where only one copy of his gospel has ever been found, and that didn’t happen until 1945.
* * *
Well, my apologies for being a bit long-winded today. Thank you for suffering through all of this. I’m doing my best to approach the spiritual journey with clear eyes and a commitment to discerning the truth. My hope for us all is that we will open our eyes so that we can experience the marvelous love in which God holds us. That we come to understand that we are not defective or broken. A little slow… yeah. A little hard of hearing… sure enough. A little ignorant… yup! But loved and cherished and always held close by the God who created us.
In the everlasting love of our Lord,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
56: The Christian World After Nicaea
Edition #56: Inside the Invisible
I have two requests. First, please send a donation help cover the expense of setting up a new website using the link:
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One would hope – after a big shindig like the Council of Nicaea, with the Emperor Constantine and all the important bishops meeting, debating, and deciding – that the fog surrounding Christian theology would lift, everyone would see Truth, and we would all live happily ever after! Despite each one of us having a lifetime of experience watching one conflict transform into another, and then into still another, we cling to our false hopes. Oh well, onward and upward…
* * *
Despite the apparent agreement at Nicaea on the two natures of Christ, major controversies persisted, not to mention a host of other theological disputes. Instead of a unified church after Nicaea, Christianity was divided among several rival groups, each tied to a particular political bloc, language, culture, and a different theology about the nature of God. By 600 A.D., the Christian world had broken into four major parts:
Byzantium, centered in Constantinople, held that Christ had two natures – both fully human and fully divine. This was the seat of imperial rule and control, and it sought to exert its control over the other three divisions.
The Miaphysites, centered in Egypt and Syria, believed Christ possessed one united nature, in which the human and divine natures were fused together. They bristled at the notion implied by previous councils that there were two Christs. These churches existed under Byzantine rule but opposed the Imperial theology.
Persian Christianity, centered in present-day Iran, held that Christ has two distinct natures. They distinguished between the Divine Logos and the human Jesus. These were the Nestorians, who considered both the divine and human natures of Christ to be fully real and complete, and not fused into a single entity. Of note, this church built one of the most remarkable missionary networks in history. By the seventh century, they had Christian communities in Persia, Central Asia, India, and China. A stele in Xi’an from 781 A.D. records this expansion.
Latin Christianity, located in the former Western Roman Empire and centered in Rome. This church emphasized a strong institutional hierarchy with bishops, priests, and deacons, and a growing papal authority. This branch of Christianity was the smallest, both geographically and in population.
Thus, the Eastern part of the Empire had three competing Christian doctrines, each of which regarded the others as heretical. Into this divided Christian world, a new revelation was proclaimed and a new religion born – Islam.
Islam spread with ferocious intensity. In 632 A.D., the prophet Mohammed died. And by 636, the Byzantine army was defeated at Yarmouk. By 640, Egypt had been conquered, and in 651 the Persian Empire collapsed. Thus, within 20 years, the entire Near East changed hands. Prior to Islam, the Middle East was the most Christian region on earth. After Islam, it gradually became Muslim – a process that occurred over centuries.
The Muslim political and military conquests did not destroy a unified Christian civilization. Rather, it entered a world where Christianity was already fragmented into rival theological cultures, and this helped make the Arab conquests possible. On a side note, the taxes imposed on non-Muslims, the jizya tax, were often lighter than Byzantium’s imperial taxation. In effect, for many, the new rulers were less burdensome than the Byzantine rulers.
* * *
So let’s look briefly at some of the other theological controversies of the time.
There was the Pneumatomachian controversy, which explored the nature of the Holy Spirit. Basically, the Church wondered about the nature of the Holy Spirit, whether the Spirit was divine or some subordinate power. While the bishops concluded that the Holy Spirit was a constituent and co-equal part of God, they didn’t spend much ink on the matter. They declared that the Holy Spirit was “Lord and giver of life, and who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Parenthetically, this seems to contradict the opening of John’s gospel, which states that all things came into being through the Logos, not through the Spirit. In any case, this controversy resulted in the doctrine of the Trinity as we now know.
The Apollinairian controversy revolved around the mind of Christ. While it was clear that Jesus had a human body, Apollinarus wondered whether Jesus' mind was the divine Logos rather than a rational human soul. In effect, he thought Jesus had a human body, but with a divine mind. This was settled at the Council of Constantinople in 381, which established the principle that Christ is fully human and fully divine.
The Nestorian controversy revolved around the nature of Christ. It explored the notion that Christ’s two natures – human and divine – might actually indicate two separate persons. The Council of Ephesus in 431 determined that Christ was one person, not two.
The Monophysite crisis taught that Christ’s humanity was absorbed into the divine nature after Jesus was incarnate. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 pronounced that Christ exists in two natures, without confusion, division, or separation.
While most people who explore these matters grasp the theological nature of these controversies, they often miss the political dimension of these battles. These conflicts also concerned control of the five major patriarchates of the time: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. Each doctrinal dispute was often aligned with regional political rivalries.
By the end of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Christianity had defined four major elements. It had decided upon a fixed Trinitarian doctrine, a defined Christology, and a hierarchical episcopal structure. It had also solidified its alliance with imperial authority. These four elements would dominate institutional Christianity for the next thousand years.
* * *
I think it’s easy for us to take these controversies lightly because we have only known their result – the institutional Church and its monolithic structure. We have never lived in an era that questioned these doctrines; we have never entertained opposing positions regarding these matters. Most of us have never thought about religion as something existential, as a life-or-death affair. As a result, these controversies seem unimportant, even trivial. After all, what difference does any of this make?
Yet, if you take religion and the spiritual life seriously, these are matters of absolute importance. Come to think of it, you can make a pretty good case that what you do spiritually will affect your outcome for all eternity, right?
Several years ago, I had breakfast with two Muslim friends, one a Muslim cleric and the other a physician. In our discussion, they commented on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. They were quite puzzled by this formulation of God, coming as they did from a strict monotheism. They understood the concept of God as Father, and from that, the notion of God as Son followed quite naturally. What they couldn’t understand was the notion of the Holy Spirit; it just didn’t make sense to them. They speculated that perhaps the idea of this third part of the Trinity was simply a mistake – perhaps a mistranslation of some key word in the distant past or something like that.
I was stunned into silence by their conclusion. I had never questioned this element of our Christian theology before. Their discussion brought to mind the larger and unstated issue: how do we determine what is real and true in spiritual matters?
Certainly, when you have an avatar like Jesus, you can trust what he has to say. The impact of someone with his extraordinary spiritual powers will always impress his listeners as the Truth. But the truth that we hide from ourselves is that we ourselves have not heard from Jesus directly. We assume that reading Scripture is the same as having a conversation with Jesus. It’s not!
We have heard reports of what Jesus said: reports from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and reports from Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and others. We don’t know how their biases have distorted Jesus’s actual teaching. We also know that these teachings have been filtered through the 2000 years of Christianity’s existence. During most of these intervening years, spiritual matters were repeatedly confused with political expediency. As a result, there are multiple levels where spiritual matters have been compromised and distorted by the various political processes that have contaminated the truth of Jesus’s teachings.
All of this leaves the Church in a most difficult place today. We are pretty confident that Jesus spoke the truth. After all, he was the person who said that he himself was “the way, the truth, and the life.” It seems unlikely that a liar would make such a claim. But beyond that, it’s hard to know where to turn for the truth about spiritual matters.
Thankfully, we have a chain of Christian mystics who have dedicated their lives to following Jesus, who have done their best to embody his holy teachings. Not only that, but the teachings of these Christians are mostly congruent with the teachings of mystics from other religious traditions. As a result, I believe we can proceed with confidence, trusting them. More on this in future newsletters.
* * *
We have taken quite the excursion into ancient church history these past several weeks. I hope I haven’t bored you or lost too many of you in the process. Now, with this as our basis, we can turn to what all of this means for us today. In a word, we will start looking for the nuggets of theological truth hidden amid all this talk of church history. We will begin next week with an in-depth exploration of the very strange notion of Original Sin. I hope you will join me because the next few newsletters will focus on sorting out theological truths from the political BS.
In the meantime, please remember that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Take some time to let go of your thinking, to let go of all the busyness in your life, and just BE. The promise is this: when we find our own being, we enter into the Being of God, and in the process, we realize that the Kingdom is truly within us.
Rest in the loving embrace of our Lord! Let his loving-kindness bring you to your deepest fulfillment!
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
55: The Politics of Nicaea
Edition #55: Inside the Invisible
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When I was a little boy in the 1950s, the prevailing opinion among the adults in charge of such things was that the Church knew all the answers, and the job of the person in the pew was to accept those answers at face value. When I went to seminary in the 70s, cracks were beginning to appear in this monolithic edifice.
Today, with the Christian Church in retreat, we have begun to realize that the Church has never been a monolithic structure, that there have always been profound divisions.
Practically speaking, this means there are no easy or universal answers. We must each sift through what is known about God on our own. We must each find our own answers. I’m hopeful that these essays on church history will help you find yours.
* * *
The answers the Church claims are universal and God–given are actually responses to specific problems that arose at particular times and in particular places.
And this brings us, in our present narrative, to the politics that drove the theological narrative arising from the Council of Nicaea – the politics the Church deliberately overlooks.
As an Episcopal priest with a graduate degree in these matters, I was taught to believe that Nicaea was about finally understanding the truth of Jesus’s nature: was Jesus human, Divine, or some combination of the two? But by focusing on the Christological issue, which is a theological concern, the Church has completely overlooked what actually happened.
The Council of Nicaea was about politics! Any concern about religion and spiritual matters was a distant second. The Council of Nicaea was not called into being by the Church itself. No. It was the Emperor, Constantine, who called for the Council and presided over its opening. What’s more, only one major issue was solved; most of the other theological issues remained without clear solutions. And the one issue that was addressed was handled with vague language to avoid offending or excluding the major political factions of the time. So, what we really have is a political compromise, which was then presented to the people as the Truth.
Here, for me, lies the strangeness, the utter weirdness of this Council. I had always understood this as a gathering of the bishops of the major churches around the Mediterranean to resolve the various heresies of the Church. As you know, there was no clear authority regarding spiritual matters in the church in its first 300 years. As a result, all sorts of strange aberrations about the nature and life of Jesus arose. (To give you an idea of how strange, consider the “gospel” that described Jesus’s boyhood as one of creating toy soldiers out of mud, breathing life into them, and watching them battle it out for his own entertainment.)
So, some sort of gathering was necessary to figure out the boundaries of this new religion. What does Christianity actually believe? What was the true nature of Jesus – was he fully human, fully divine, or something else again? The resolution of these questions was critical. You can’t just have someone going around – kind of like we have today – saying that Jesus is from another planet, or that the holy Eucharist is some kind of magical potion. (Strangely, we seem to be replicating the chaos of the early Church in our own time, with all sorts of strange claims by folks who claim authority in the Christian world, but who are making claims that cannot be verified!)
* * *
So, back to Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. After decades of civil war, Constantine had recently unified the Roman Empire through military means. By 325 A.D., the Empire was a patchwork of territories (most of them conquered and occupied by Roman armies), ethnic groups, and religions. In addition, the Empire was divided socially into Roman citizens (who had all the rights and privileges), noncitizens, and slaves. Constantine’s problem was finding some way to unite these different factions into a coherent whole. As you might imagine, governance would be impossible without a single frame of reference that was more or less acceptable to everyone.
Constantine looked to the Christian church as the potential ideological glue for his empire. As he looked into the matter, however, he found, instead of unity, a series of bitter doctrinal conflicts, especially in Egypt and the eastern provinces. The central controversy was called the Arian dispute.
Arius argued that the Son was created by the Father, and therefore was not eternal. He had a clever slogan, “There was when he was not.” As you will remember, the theology of John stated the opposite in the opening words of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” This was clearly a statement aimed directly against Arius and his teachings. This dispute spread rapidly across the eastern empire, creating considerable chaos.
Poor Constantine. He thought he had picked a winner with this new religion, Christianity, but apparently, he didn’t check that horse’s mouth very carefully. For Constantine, this theological dispute was perceived as a threat to Imperial unity, and he could not let it stand. As a result, he imposed a Council on the Christian bishops to force a settlement.
This Council took place over several years, and between 200 and 300 bishops attended, mostly from the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire. Very few Western bishops were present, so this was not a representative assembly like we know today. Constantine himself opened the Council, which is a clear indication of how important it was to him. The central theological issue debated by the bishops was: “Is Christ fully divine?”
Of note, Arius’s position – that the Father is eternal and the Son is created and is therefore subordinate – actually preserved a strict monotheism. This position, however, lost the political battle. Arius’s opponents, led by Athanasius and Alexander, held that the Son is eternal and shares the same divine nature as the Father. Specifically, they said that the Son was of the same substance as the Father. This became the foundation of the Nicene Creed.
So much for the theological controversy. Now let’s get to the heart of the matter and look at the politics. This theological debate did not occur in a vacuum. Constantine exerted direct pressure on this gathering of bishops. Remember, in the Roman world, the Emperor held the power of life and death over his subjects, and he had a substantial military to enforce his will. He expected an agreement, and the bishops knew that if they did not agree, they would be exiled, or worse. And that is what happened to Arius and his followers: the dissenters were branded as heretics and punished with exile.
* * *
Let’s step back from these historical events for a moment and look at the implications of these developments. At the very beginning of the Christian church, we have the ruling political leader, Emperor Constantine, dictating the Church’s spiritual beliefs. While the Emperor let the bishops debate among themselves about what was true spiritually, he made the final call. As a result, we cannot be sure that these claims about the nature of Jesus are true, because they come from a political rather than a spiritual authority. We do know with certainty that Constantine had the final say in this matter, and we do know that his central aim was to create a unifying ideology acceptable to all the people he governed.
A second compromising factor lies in the way the bishops arrived at spiritual truth: they debated with each other, and in the end, they voted. To make this matter clear, this means that the bishops, in their many conversations, also determined spiritual truth by politicalmeans. While they did not have the power to impose their will as Constantine did, they used a similar political process.
To make matters even worse, the final wording adopted at Nicaea was rather slippery. “Constantine’s one overriding motive was to secure the greatest possible agreement” to bring as many as possible under his rule. To secure this end, the Council was willing to use rather vague language in its final formulations. This language allowed for the widest possible measure of agreement, thus satisfying Constantine’s overriding concern.
* * *
So, where does that leave us today? In my mind, and after looking at these data, it seems like the Church has both feet firmly planted on solid air! While we have thought that the major tenets of the Christian faith have been based on revelation from God, it turns out that many of these same tenets are the result of political compromises. While they may state truth, we seem to have little spiritual basis for these assertions. Ironically, I am reminded of the rationale many young people give when they are caught doing something illegal or immoral: “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Since we turn to God and to our religion for certainty and truth, this conclusion is rather frightening. And yet, if you sit with these ideas, it becomes clear that we are being called to look deeper. To look much deeper. I believe we are each called to look within and to discover the living Christ who dwells in our hearts. To discover and experience in our own flesh the “Kingdom of Heaven” that lies within us.
There is a problem with this view, of course. It means that ultimately each of us is our own authority. And here we come face-to-face with the central problem of the early church: who is in charge? Who has the final authority to determine spiritual truth from falsehood? So let’s continue with our explorations.
* * *
Returning to our central narrative, Nicaea created an Imperial Church. It did not immediately end the Arian controversy – that continued for several hundred more years. It did not address most of the other early heretical movements, such as the Gnostics, the Marcionites, or the Ebionites, either. That said, the alliance of the Church and the Empire marginalized and eventually suppressed these movements. In effect, the Imperial Church gained the power to define orthodoxy.
The key feature of this alliance between church and state was that the state enforced doctrinal authority. The Spanish Inquisition is a vivid example of this kind of alliance. It also meant that bishops functioned as arms of the state, within the Imperial administration. Finally, it meant that theological disputes were treated as issues of public order and, therefore, subject to Imperial rule. This fusion shaped Christianity for the next 1500 years.
The real significance of Nicaea is not the creed that bears its name. The real significance is that Christian doctrine became a matter of Imperial governance. After 325 A.D., theology was no longer just a religious debate. It became a political question about the stability of the Roman Empire.
The Nicene Council did not produce unity. It produced an enforceable orthodoxy, and these two are not the same thing. The Empire gained a uniform ideology, but theological conflict within Christianity intensified over the next two centuries. We will look at this intensification in our next newsletter.
* * *
Again, thank you for your patience and for continuing to plow through this material. I myself am fascinated by the parallels between the early church and our own time. Understanding the historical antecedents allows us to draw more sensible conclusions about our faith. I have always felt that finding the truth about something is both important and valuable. I appreciate your willingness to travel down these roads with me. Thank you.
Please remember to set aside time every day for at least five minutes of meditation and quiet reflection. Ultimately, our willingness to travel into our own depths will determine how close we can come to the everlasting Truth.
May you rest in God’s love every moment of this week!
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
54: The Theology of St. Paul and Beyond
Edition #54: Inside the Invisible
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Over the past month, we have explored the original Torah–based Christianity that was centered in Jerusalem and around the person of James the Just, the brother of Jesus. We then went on to explore the theology in the Gospel of Thomas, and the Johannine theology. These last two perspectives are almost polar opposites: Thomas focuses on the humanity of Jesus, while John focuses on the cosmic Christ. Now we turn our gaze to the theology we are most familiar with, that of Paul.
* * *
Paul’s story is a curious one. He begins his spiritual journey as a Jewish Pharisee. As such, he was not just opposed to Jesus and his teachings, he was an active persecutor. A passage in Acts states that he was “ravaging the church by entering house after house, (and,) dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison.” (8.3)
On his way to Damascus to arrest more of Jesus’s followers, Paul had a mystical experience – a vision of Jesus – who said to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” This experience left him blinded, and three days later, a devout follower of Jesus, Ananias, laid hands on him and Paul’s sight was restored. From that moment, Saul became a follower of Jesus and changed his name to Paul.
Can you imagine the consternation among the apostles and the followers of Jesus? This vicious cop, who rages through the Christian community and drags whole families off to prison, has a conversion experience? Claims to have had a vision of Jesus? Claims now to be an apostle, equal to the 11 remaining disciples? What you do with this? Do you take him at his word or do you throw him and his so-called conversion out into the street?
Paul and his claims posed a serious problem for the early followers of Jesus. Remember the difficulty of their situation. Their leader has been arrested, tortured, and executed as a common criminal. The Jewish establishment – the Pharisees and the scribes – were out for blood. And this guy, Saul, has Christian blood on his hands. But now he’s claims to be a new man, with a new name, and he’s suddenly saying that he’s on your side. Does this really sound credible?
The problem facing the disciples was one of authority: there was no central authority that could pass judgment on the genuineness of Paul’s conversion. He was certainly regarded with great suspicion, but there was no clear way to get rid of him. As a result, he was rather grudgingly accepted.
So, that’s how Paul’s Christian journey started. What is even more amazing is how it ended. Paul’s understanding of Jesus and his teaching – that is,his understanding of the man whom he never heard, who he never met – becomes the predominant understanding of the Christian church! Paul’s theology was the winner in the “Christian Theological Sweepstakes,” and it is his understanding of Jesus that most Christians accept as “gospel” today. What a stunning turnaround!
* * *
So let’s trace, as best as we can, how Paul’s theology developed. His earliest letter, the first letter to the church in Thessalonica, is apocalyptic in nature. He proclaims Jesus as the risen Lord and encourages the church there to prepare for his imminent coming and the last days. You can see how this would follow from his vision. That’s exactly what he experienced – the risen Christ is coming and is coming right now!
Of course, as we now know, the world was not destroyed in an apocalyptic cataclysm, so Paul’s thinking gradually changes in response. He is surrounded by most of the original disciples who adhere to a Torah–driven theology, with an emphasis on following the Law. Paul, on the other hand, is a Roman citizen and has a more cosmopolitan perspective. He wants to carry his understanding of the message of Jesus to the wider community of Gentiles. For him, “Jewishness” is no longer at the core of Christian identity.
Paul’s theology, however, is not systematic. He doesn’t sit down and write a treatise about Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit, and humanity. Rather, his theology develops in response to various crises in the Christian communities throughout the Mediterranean. He addresses factionalism within the church, and the charismatic disorder in Corinth. In Galatians, he addresses the Torah crisis and the identity boundary of circumcision and following the Jewish law. In later letters he explores the differences between justification by faith versus justification by works, and he breaks with the Torah–boundary logic.
Then, in his most mature work, the letter to the Romans, Paul connects Adam and Christ as part of a master narrative. Here he states that sin came into the world through the disobedience of Adam. Conversely, Jesus’s actions – his obedience to the will of the Father – have redeemed humanity. In effect, Paul has taken the Jewish issue of who to include as a Christian and reframed the problem. Now it is no longer an issue of following the Law. Now the issue is a universal one – one that tries to address both our sense of human wrongdoing and the intervention of God’s grace through the person of Jesus.
By adopting Paul’s understanding, the Church frames the problem as a problem common to all humanity. This positions the Church as an institution that solves our universal problems and as an institution that is open to everyone.
* * *
Now, you might wonder, like I did, how Paul came to link Adam with Jesus. It turns out that there was an already-existing stream of thought in Judaism that connected Adam’s transgression with death. In the Torah, in Genesis 3.19, God confronts Adam after the apple and condemns him to death: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Notice that only Adam is condemned to death here; there is no universal condemnation of humanity at all. In the Jewish line of thinking, Adam’s disobedience resulted in a corruption of the natural Edenic human condition. This is far different from the Christian notion of an indelible and universal stain.
This was not yet a doctrine of Original Sin. That would come later, in the fourth century, with St. Augustine. At this point, there was no fully worked out theory of inherited guilt transmitted by procreation. There was no defined account of infant guilt. And there was not even a clear concept of an “original” sin. In fact, the Jews of that era had no concept of Original Sin.
Let this fact settle in for a moment. The people who gave us the story of Adam and Eve did not give us the doctrine of Original Sin. To this day, Jews do not believe in Original Sin. The truth is, this doctrine was made up some 400+ years after the death of Jesus by Augustine of Hippo.
While early Christian writers discuss Adam, death, corruption, and the human propensity to sin, the notion of an inherited guilt was not a settled doctrine in the first and second centuries. The notion of Original Sin is developed by Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries – much later.
Augustine argued that humanity is radically dependent on grace, and he argued for the notion of inherited guilt. This concept has been widely spread throughout Western Christendom and is a central dogma in most Western denominations to this day. Of note, Eastern Christendom, while accepting the notion of an inherited mortality as a result of Adam’s disobedience, did not accept the notion of an inherited guilt.
If you will, Paul supplies the raw materials necessary for the doctrine of Original Sin. Augustine then builds the Western theology of hereditary guilt and salvation through Christ’s actions out of the raw materials which Paul supplied. Paul was trying to make Israel’s God acceptable to the Gentiles at scale. To do this, you need a universal anthropology – a doctrine of wrongdoing leading to death that applies to all humanity – to justify a universal remedy, namely Christ. This new doctrine obliterates the Torah boundary markers and opens the Christian faith to everyone.
* * *
In my understanding, the notion of Original Sin is simply wrong. It’s based on a misunderstanding between our current understanding of sin and the sin that Jesus spoke of. He didn't speak to condemn sinners. He doesn't speak to condemn you or me. His admonitions, if you can even call them that, are to return to our relationship with God, our connection with the Divine. He calls us with the deepest love to remember our true nature – to remember that Christ, the son of God, lives within us. To remember that we, too, are his children. His beloved children!
* * *
Well, I suspect I have given you more than enough to wrap your head around for this week. When we sift through the early Christian writings, we can clearly see how our forebearers had to create the Church as they went along. Without this historical perspective, we simply assume that the Church has a set of coherent and well-thought-out answers that can solve all of our problems. In actual fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.
The answers that we accept as dogma today were actually responses to specific problems at specific times and places. They are not universal answers, suitable at all times for all believers. Thus, in my view, it is up to each follower to examine the data and to determine for themselves what is true.
It is abundantly clear that the Church has made many errors throughout its history. There are so many and they are so obvious that there is no need to attempt an accounting here. It is sufficient to say that God did not make that bump on the top of our necks just to attract the opposite sex. He created us with minds to think and with a desire to understand the truth. To do any less means that we turn our back on the Truth. To do any less means that we turn our backs on God.
Thank you for your perseverance in reading through these essays. Please remember to spend some time every day going within yourself and meditating. As Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” It is by looking within that you will find your greatest freedom. It is by looking within that you will find the everlasting Love of God!
In the peace of God which passes all understanding,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
53: The Christianity of St. John
Edition #53: Inside the Invisible
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Over the past two weeks, we have been examining the different schools of Christian thought that developed after Jesus’s death. First, we looked at those followers of Jesus who kept their Jewish identity: those who followed Jewish laws and worshiped at the Temple. Last week, we studied the Gospel of Thomas and the very different theology promoted by the Thomasine school. Today, we focus on the Johannine school – a school of thought that developed in the late first century, between 80 and 100 A.D., and seemed to revolve around the city of Ephesus.
Johannine theology was much more successful than the theology of Thomas. For one, this school of theology left behind four texts: the Gospel of John and the three letters of John, all found in the New Testament canon. This strand of Christ-centered teaching appears to have centered in Asia Minor and remained as a separate and identifiable theological strand until the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.
Johannine theology served as the bridge between Jewish monotheism and the Nicene Trinitarianism. It has a very high concept of the nature of Christ, and in this way, it is very different from the other theological schools that emerged after Jesus’s death. For John, Jesus stands outside the created order and existed prior to it. This pre-existing Logos then incarnates, as stated in the Gospel of John: “The Word became flesh.” This Word maintains a constant unity with the Father: “The Father and I are one.”
As a result, Jesus is clearly seen as the Son of God. Jesus's role, then, is to reveal the Father to humanity. In addition, Jesus is understood as the Son of Man, but in this role, he functions more as a cosmic apocalyptic figure rather than just a human being.
Like the Gospel of Thomas, John emphasizes that eternal life is available now, and the resurrected life is already present. In essence, he internalizes the apocalypse. Eternal life is available right now, and judgment is occurring in the present moment. Resurrected life is already present and available.
In contrast with Thomas, though, John has an explicitly dualistic theology. He sharply contrasts between light and darkness, between above and below, between truth and falsehood, and between the children of God and the children of the devil.
For John, Jesus is not simply the Messiah. He is the self-revelation of God.
The God of John is radically transcendent, for no one has seen God – he is above and beyond all human knowledge. At the same time, God is fundamentally imminent— an inward Presence that manifests through the power of the Spirit. Here, we see that John’s concept of the Holy Spirit is central to his teachings. For John, the Spirit provides the believer with ongoing revelation and serves as both an internal teacher and a continual source of authority.
Of note, John’s understanding of the Holy Spirit differs significantly from that held by fundamentalist groups today. While the Holy Spirit is both teacher and a source of authority, there is no speaking in tongues, prophecy, healing, or the other manifestations attributed to the Holy Spirit today. Charismatic phenomena were not central to Johannine self-understanding. For this school, the Spirit’s primary function was revelatory and ontological, not performative. Authority rested in truth and relational participation, not spectacle.
Johannine theology differed in other respects as well. For example, there are several key female figures in John, including the Samaritan woman, who is the first to question Jesus about theological matters; Mary of Bethany, who is cast as the model disciple; and Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the resurrection. All of this suggests, in contrast to the widespread patriarchal frame of that time, that women were seen by this group as having theological agency. This further suggests a less rigid ecclesiastical hierarchy. The epistles of John, however, reflect a tightening of these boundaries over time.
The Johannine school derives its authority from three sources. The first is from eyewitness testimony. John frequently uses the phrase, “we have seen,” and this grounding in the visible and in personal experience of Jesus constitutes the initial basis for authority. In addition, John refers to the ongoing teaching of the Holy Spirit as a further basis for authority. Finally, John roots his authority in what he believes to be the correct cosmic Christology.
Over time, authority increasingly shifted towards episcopal structures. As Ignatius of Antioch and other bishops of the era asserted their primacy and authority, the Johannine communities appear to have gradually adopted this view.
* * *
There were several serious conflicts, both within the Johannine community and with other communities that existed at the time. John’s letters clearly reflect a split within his community. They describe a group that has “gone out from us” (1 John 2.19). This group appears to have held the belief that Jesus only appeared to be human; that he did not truly possess a physical body, and thus, he did not actually suffer. This view was competing with John’s understanding of Jesus’s Incarnation, and it created in a significant disruption of communal authority as a result.
There were also major conflicts with the broader Jewish community. The Johannine school seems to have originated within the community of Jewish Christians, led by James the Just. As Johannine theology developed, both the Jewish Christians and the larger Jewish community came to regard these followers of Jesus as heretics. Consequently, they were expelled from the synagogue. In effect, they were pushed out of their own religious environment.
This conflict produced a theological radicalization within the Johannine community. Their sense of Jesus as the Messiah escalates to Jesus as the pre-existent Logos, who is eternally one with the Father. The more Jesus is rejected by the Jews, the more cosmic he becomes for this Christian community. One of the consequences of this was an increasingly sharp dualism, with binaries such as light versus darkness, truth versus falsehood, and tellingly, the children of God versus the children of the devil. These binaries are conflict language, and they function to preserve group identity after expulsion.
This conflict reshapes the Johannine understanding of Jesus. Since they can no longer worship in the Temple, the Temple is vilified, described as a “marketplace,” and becomes the abode of the moneychangers. Jesus then speaks of himself as the new temple, which God will raise up in three days. In effect, the Johannine school, being expelled from the synagogue, relocates sacred space into Christ.
You can see the traumatic effects of this expulsion here. Jesus, the disciples, and the Johannine community were all Jews. This means that the Gospel of John is rightly understood as describing a family feud. The vilification of the Jews in John’s Gospel has nothing to do with the anti-Semitism of later Christians.
It is important to understand that the harsh language (“children of the devil”) found in John is trauma language. John is writing from a sense of profound loss. For John’s community, it must’ve felt as if they were pushed out of their spiritual home by the people they were regarded as brothers and sisters.
The third and final conflict experienced by the Johannine community occurred in the second century. During this century, spiritual authority began to coalesce around the person of the bishop of the in these early Christian communities scattered around the Mediterranean. You can see how this conflict might arise. The followers of John believed that the Holy Spirit is present in the hearts of the followers of Jesus, and this Spirit, coming from the Father and Jesus, is the ultimate authority. The bishops of the various churches, especially Clement of Rome and Ireneus, vigorously contested this.
This development did not just come out of nowhere. It was the bishops’ response to the plethora of competing ideas about Jesus that arose during this time. Remember, this development takes place before there was any recognizable authority. There was no list of authoritative scriptures to rely on. There was no set of Christian beliefs by which you could judge a theology. There was no central Christian leader who would determine whether a theological statement was true or false.
As you might suspect, this chaotic matrix gave rise to all kinds of wild speculations about the nature of Jesus, the nature of God, and the nature of humanity. The bishops were faced with the problem of sorting through this unholy mess. As a result, the bishops of Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria began asserting their primacy and their authority.
They were guided by several principles. First, they asked if the doctrine was rooted in the apostles of Jesus. Given that these men (and women) had actual direct experience with Jesus, their doctrines were likely to be closer to the truth than those who had no such direct experience. Second, an orthodoxy, based on writings attributed to the apostles, was beginning to emerge in Christian thinking. Did the doctrine conform with this emerging orthodoxy or was it in opposition? These criteria, promulgated by the bishops, came to define early Christian thinking and doctrine.
Of note, Johannine theology was flexible enough to be claimed by multiple factions in these early years. It’s theology was absorbed into the emerging catholic (here meaning “universal”) orthodoxy. Thus, the Gospel of John is fully canonical and Johannine theology has become mainstream. The independent school, however, did not survive.
* * *
The outcome was this. The cosmic Christology of John becomes the foundation of Nicene theology. Spiritual authority, on the other hand, is subordinated to the episcopal structure. Female agency is reduced in this later catholic consolidation. The pronounced dualism of John is moderated, and the independent Johannine communities are absorbed into the catholic institutional church.
Here is the strange conclusion. The Johannine school was theologically radical, mystically inclined, and centered around a cosmic Christ and an indwelling Holy Spirit. In effect, it’s theology triumphed over him most of the competing theologies of the time. That said, by 300 A.D. the school as a movement had vanished. What a paradoxical outcome!
* * *
Well, that’s enough for today. Next week I will try to close this series by looking at the grand winner in the “Christian Doctrinal Sweepstakes,” the strange theology of St. Paul. I hope you are finding these essays interesting, and they are helping you to understand how our apparently monolithic faith came to be. When you start to take it apart and examine the pieces, you begin to see why the Christian faith has so many conflicting and contradictory elements. The difficulty, in my view, is that spiritual truth is often forsaken in the process.
As a result, many have been (and are currently being) misled. As a result, instead of the spiritual freedom promised by Jesus and all of the great avatars, sincere seekers are misdirected away from the Truth. They find themselves locked in belief structures that loop upon themselves, creating a kind of mental jail. From long observation, I have concluded that mental jails are much more difficult to escape from than the ones built from concrete and steel.
Please remember to take time every day to go within yourself. Your freedom lies there, and is waiting for you to come and take the key and step into the fullness that God has created for you.
God bless you!
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
52: The Gospel of Thomas and the Thomasine School
Edition #52: Inside the Invisible
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Last week, we began looking at how the church came into being in the aftermath of Jesus’s execution. We explored how James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the initial leader of this proto-Christian movement. Centered in Jerusalem, this school of thought focused on tailoring the life and message of Jesus to fulfill the messianic hopes of the Jews. They created communities that focused on the Torah and keeping the many laws prescribed by Judaism.
As we continue our archaeological dig, the next earliest development hinges on an almost forgotten gospel, the Gospel of Thomas. This is a fascinating development because it shows very clearly the power struggles among those early groups who were attempting to follow Jesus's teachings.
The only known copy of the Gospel of Thomas was found buried in the sands of the Egyptian desert in 1945. It was found along with many other books from the early Christian era that were suppressed after the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. Some of these books are fragmentary, while others, such as the Gospel of Thomas, appear to be complete.
Biblical scholars initially dismissed the importance of these books and simply labeled them as gnostic texts. This put them in the category of “interesting collateral information,” but not really very important. As later scholars examined these texts, however, they drew very different conclusions. They began to see a plethora of viewpoints in the early Church that had been unknown until then.
What emerges from this finding is a dawning understanding of what happened to these followers of Jesus as they dispersed after his death. Instead of a single, monolithic faith, the first 200 years after Jesus' death appear to have been a time of great spiritual exploration. Remember, in the chaos that followed Jesus’s execution, there was no creed or statement of faith. There was no Scripture to refer to for answers. There was no authority to settle questions of belief. There was no way to separate the truth about Jesus and his teachings from what was false. The situation was chaotic.
Imagine, for a moment, what you might do if you found yourself in this situation. It seems reasonable that you would collect the stories that you and your friends remembered about Jesus. Then, depending on your biases, you would begin exploring what the stories meant. In other words, you would begin to theologize and make meaning from these stories.
It’s important to note that you would not be working in isolation. There would be other groups of Jesus followers scattered throughout the Mediterranean, and other points of view about his teachings. As a result, it seems natural that very different theologies would arise.
Let me give you some examples. We know that Paul thought that women should be seen but not heard in a church setting. While he had a number of female helpers, Thecla and Phoebe come to mind, he clearly reflected the patriarchal culture of his Jewish heritage. Other Christian writers from this era had very different ideas about the proper role of women.
In the same cache of documents as the Gospel of Thomas, we find fragments from the Gospel of Mary. Authorship of this book is attributed to Mary Magdalene, and it clearly indicates her role as an equal to the Apostles. In this gospel and in other texts, there is no mention of the alleged prostitution that was later associated with Mary Magdalene. Other texts support this very different understanding of a woman’s role, and indicate a much more robust role for women than Paul was comfortable with.
Even more astonishing, we find fragments from a book titled “The Thunder, Perfect Mind.” This text, delivered by a female in the first-person voice, is filled with passages like the following:
“I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter,” and so on.
What do you make of the book filled with these wild contradictions? These strange paradoxes? Among other things, we can certainly conclude that there were serious differences, and even contradictions among the different proto-Christian communities scattered around the Mediterranean.
As we will show later, the political needs of the Roman Empire led to the suppression of all these points of view, save one – that of Paul and his doctrine of sin and salvation by faith. As I reflect on this, I am deeply saddened. This suppression, while politically expedient at the time, deeply damaged our understanding of the person of Jesus and damaged our understanding of his teachings.
* * *
So let’s go back to where we began today – looking at the Gospel of Thomas.
This gospel is very different from the four canonical Gospels found in the New Testament. It has nothing about Jesus' birth and nothing about his death and resurrection. Instead, it comprises 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. While versions of some of these sayings are familiar, others are strikingly different.
I’m going to assume that most of my readers are not familiar with the Gospel of Thomas. Thomas's ideas are radically different from those in the New Testament. This does not mean they are “wrong.” Rather, it underscores the point that there were many different interpretations of Jesus’s life and teaching, as well as serious power struggles between competing proto–Christian communities. You might think of it as parallel to our present situation, where Orthodox, Catholic, liberal Protestant, Evangelical, and Fundamentalist theologies all compete with one another.
Here is a timeline that we can reconstruct from the available evidence. For the first 20 years after Jesus’s execution, sayings and narratives about his life were collected, but there were no authority structures. Between about 50-70 A.D., several groupings of Jesus’ sayings began to be compiled, one by Thomas and the other by Mark. Between 70 and 90 A.D., the synoptic Gospels were consolidated. From about 90-110 A.D., the Johannine understanding of Christ emerges as a cosmic and mystical interpretation of Jesus, an interpretation that was quite different from the portrait described in the synoptic Gospels. Finally, around 110–130 A.D., a bishop–centered authority emerges, driven by Ignatius, the Bishop of Lyons, among others.
The Gospel of Thomas stands in clear opposition to what came to be known as the institutional Church. Rather than describing humanity as sinful and broken, as Paul did, Thomas asserts that Reality is whole and that our ignorance of what is real is the core problem. This ignorance is overcome through insight and seeing Reality. Christ Jesus does not stand as a mediator in this account; in fact, no mediator is necessary because Reality is available for anyone with “eyes to see.”
This version of Christianity repudiates the control structures of the emerging Christian orthodoxy. It was implicitly anti-Imperial. There was no glorification of Rome, no legitimization of violence, and no cosmic endorsement of Empire.
It was also explicitly against ecclesiastical authority. It denied the notion of apostolic succession or any external authority. It denied that belief alone could result in salvation. Instead, the Thomasine school asserted that Truth is immediately accessible to all who are willing to open their eyes and see it. Every follower of Jesus was invited to verify his teachings through their own experience.
As you can see, this was a direct threat to the emerging power of the bishops.
Pauline theology is based on fear and control. In Paul’s view, human beings are stained by the sin, ‘the badness,’ of Adam. Their only hope is the salvation offered by Jesus’s sacrifice of his life. This entails submitting to the authority of the Church, receiving the Church's sacraments, and, if everything works out, perhaps you will find yourself in heaven after you die.
* * *
The Thomasine school drew very different conclusions from these same data about the life and teaching of Jesus. Thomas asserted that the kingdom of God is already present. It’s not coming sometime in the future, it is not mediated by Jesus, and it is not some external event like ‘going to heaven.’ Instead, Thomas asserts that, “The Kingdom is (already) inside of you and outside of you.” (Emphasis mine.)
In this view, the fundamental human problem is not sin, but ignorance. Thus, the idea of salvation is significantly altered. It is not forgiveness. It is not the substitution of Jesus’s purity in place of our sinfulness. Instead, it is recognition that we are already in the presence of God.
Jesus’s life, then, is transformed by this understanding. He is no longer the “Redeemer,” he is the Revealer. Thus, there is no sacrificial theology and no exalted and cosmic Christ. Instead, Jesus functions to point out the Way. He is a provocateur, using paradox to shake up our conventional view of ourselves and the world.
The Gospel of Thomas was written for anyone who seeks. As such, everyone has equal standing, and there is no such thing as a clerical class. It is not an evangelical theology. It doesn’t want growth in numbers; instead, it wants growth in depth of understanding. This is not an intellectual understanding, but rather an experiential one – a direct perception of Reality.
Thomas states that the Divine is not to be found elsewhere. The Divine is right here in our midst and inside each one of us. The unity that connects us – a form of non-duality we have explored in previous newsletters – is obscured, but it is not broken. The problem is our failure to recognize what already is.
Thus, we are not saved by the intercession of another, nor are we repaired from the outside, nor are we redeemed by substitution. Instead, our task is to understand experientially what we already are. In this view, Jesus does not possess divinity on his own – he is not the only son of God. Rather, Jesus exemplifies what each of us already is, and he invites us to awaken to our own deepest inner Reality.
* * *
As you can see, Thomas makes the institutional church impossible. He systematically undercuts the fear-based methods of control used in the institutional church. He ignores the clergy and the sacraments. He sees all people as inherently equal – an understanding that resonates in our contemporary world.
The Thomasine stream of understanding did not disappear because it lost the battle for “hearts and minds.” The Thomasine school was suppressed because it could not be weaponized by bishops or emperors. In my view, we owe a great debt of gratitude to the unknown Christians who refused to burn the Gospel of Thomas, but instead hid it in a clay jar and buried it outside a cemetery in the deserts of Egypt. Their courage and devotion to the Truth have enabled us to draw back the curtains of history and peer into the actual circumstances of the early Church.
The Gospel of Thomas is not a missionary tract or a catechism for new believers. The author of this gospel wrote for committed insiders seeking direct experiential insight. Thomas wrote for those who were already followers of Jesus, for those already disillusioned with authority, ritual, and the notion of a delayed salvation. He wrote for those capable of a sustained contemplative reflection, and I suspect this includes many, if not most, of my readers.
For Thomas, the focus is on the direct perception of the spiritual reality which underlies our phenomenal world. He is interested in changing our understanding of Being – our own being and the being we attribute to God. In his view, awakening is not the adoption of a particular set of beliefs, nor is it a moral achievement. Instead, awakening is a structural change in how Reality is experienced. Instead of our egocentric, Me–Me–Me, the true Christian awakens to a direct perception of the Divine. This, in his view, is the stuff of salvation.
* * *
I think I will bring this to a close for now. I am hopeful that this essay disrupts your understanding of the Church. I do not believe the Church would exist today without the structure provided by the institution. That said, I am deeply saddened that the understandings presented in the Gospel of Thomas have been suppressed so completely.
While I am grateful for the institutional Church and all of its trappings, and bells and whistles, I am deeply saddened that the understandings presented in Gospel of Thomas have been suppressed so completely.
May you find your true home in the arms of our Lord!
God bless you, now and always,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
51: Excavating the History of the Church
Edition #51: Inside the Invisible
I hope you are a fan of archaeology like I am. I am fascinated by how our ancestors lived and how our present world has been shaped by their efforts in the past. I have been captivated most recently by church history, of all things!
Here’s what piqued my interest. When I was a child, the ‘Church’ I received was a massive and monolithic structure. All the important questions had been answered, and your job as a good Christian was to believe, Period! Questions were allowed, but only if they were asked humbly and with great respect.
Since retiring a couple of years ago, I have been able to catch up on recent research exploring the very beginnings of the Christian faith. As I have delved into these materials, I have found that the early church was anything but the monolithic structure I received as a child. In fact, there were very different understandings about what Jesus taught, radically different understandings of who Jesus was, and wild differences in how people responded to all of this.
For example, Jesus is often referred to as ‘Rabbi,’ which means teacher. That’s a pretty easy concept for all of us to grasp, since we have all had many different kinds of teachers. We know from our own experience what teachers are like. But in other places in the Bible, Jesus is the cosmic Logos – that great Being through whom “all things came to be,” as described in the gospel of John. Here are two very different understandings of who Jesus was and what he was about. One is simple and humble, the other is grand and cosmic. Which one is accurate?
Another anomaly. We have all heard of ‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ but I have never heard the phrase, ‘Jesus of Bethlehem.’ Yet, it’s my understanding that during Biblical times, people were called by their birthplace – for example, Saul of Tarsus. Is this an indication that Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem? Does this mean the narratives surrounding his birth – such as the journey to Bethlehem, being born in a manger, the shepherds receiving word of his birth from the angels, the three wise men from the East, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight into Egypt – are all made-up stories?
And speaking of his birth, why do only two of the four canonical Gospels record the birth narratives? The stories in Matthew and Luke are cosmic in their significance. If you are trying to ‘sell’ a new religion, you certainly would want to marshal these stories as evidence. So why did Mark and John omit the birth narratives? What’s going on here?
As these questions arose, I began to wonder how the monolithic church that I received as a child came to be. And what happened to the wide variety of understandings about the teaching and person of Jesus that existed in the first 200 years after his death? In an attempt to answer these questions, I have decided to dig a little and explore what we know about the early church and its many different perspectives.
* * *
Let’s start with the immediate aftermath of Jesus’s execution and the very natural reaction of his followers to run and hide. Imagine what it was like for his disciples – they begin the week with the crowds in Jerusalem cheering them on, waving palm branches and welcoming Jesus into their city with “Hosannas” and shouts of joy. The crowd probably had a mix of expectations. Some of them expected Jesus to be the Messiah and to lead a rebellion to throw off their Roman overlords. Others expected some kind of religious revival, where the religion of the Jews would be purified, and the Jewish people would regain their favored position in God’s eyes.
Seven days later, however, the expectations of the crowds and Jesus’s disciples are in ruins. Jesus has been executed by the state as a criminal, and his disciples have fled or are in hiding in Jerusalem. The Jesus movement is completely disorganized and trembling in fear. Their revered leader is not there to guide them. What should they do?
Despite following their Rabbi, their teacher, for three years or so, the disciples are running in fear for their lives. The crowds, once so fervent in their adoration, have turned.
You can imagine the crowd’s disappointment, too. They had expected some massive triumph, but instead they got the worst possible outcome. The catalyst for their supposed triumph was arrested, tortured, and publicly executed. The crowds felt betrayed. So their disappointment turns to rage, and they actively look for this ‘charlatan’s’ disciples so that they can vent their anger.
In this chaotic situation, something vitally important is missing! It is so simple that we take it for granted, and as a result, it is invisible to us. It is simply this: none of the institutional tools we take for granted existed yet. There was no creed – no clear understanding of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus. The term, Christian, hadn’t been invented yet, so there wasn’t even a label for their group identity.
There were no scriptures. There was no organization, no church structure. There was nothing authoritative to go on, so there was no guidance whatsoever. Basically, these early followers of Jesus had to make up a church as they went forward.
* * *
What these early followers of Jesus had were memories of his teaching and his actions. It seems likely that some of these followers took notes when Jesus was teaching. But since these early followers tended to come from the lower levels of Jewish society, it seems likely that most were illiterate. The frequent mention of scribes in the New Testament indicates that these literate members of society were few in number and had a special place on the social ladder.
So, what would you do if you found yourself in this situation? Your entire world – all of your hopes and expectations – has utterly collapsed. You are now being hunted, and the crowd wants your blood. You are terrorized, so you do what feels right – you run and hide. If confronted by someone who recognizes you, like Peter, you deny any knowledge of this Jesus fellow. You are in fear for your life!
Some, like Peter and Jesus’s brother, James the Just, stayed in Jerusalem. After the uproar died down, they emerged and developed a school of Christianity that focused on tailoring the life and message of Jesus so that it fulfilled the messianic hopes of the Jews. Adherents of this school identified primarily as Jews and remained Torah–observant. In actual fact, it was not a single, monolithic school, but rather a cluster of related movements that were initially centered in Jerusalem and later scattered across Syria and Transjordan.
James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the principal leader of the Jerusalem church. They emphasized observance of the Torah, including circumcision, the Sabbath, Jewish dietary laws, and reverence for the temple, before its destruction in 70 A.D. They saw Jesus as the Davidic Messiah and emphasized his humanness. They stressed Jesus’s ethical teaching, especially his Sermon on the Mount. According to the book of Acts, they practiced communal sharing and lived in poverty and simplicity. Authority was located in the “brother of the Lord,” James the Just.
After James died in 62 A.D., and after the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D., the group scattered and was marginalized. Jews tended to see them as just another reform group, and eventually came to see them as too Christian for Judaism. The Gentile Christians, on the other hand, came to see them as heretical because of their emphasis on the Torah and their focus on the humanity of Jesus. For these Christians, they were too Jewish for the emerging Catholic Christianity.
So what can we make of all this? In my view, it is crucial to realize that this Jewish Christianity was the original matrix of the Jesus movement. As nearly as we can tell from a divide of some 2000 years, this flavor of Christianity was as close to Jesus’s actual teaching as we can determine. The Pauline theology of faith and salvation by grace eventually supplanted this initial Jewish Christianity. What is more, we can start to see that the Pauline theology, so familiar to us today, was only one of many schools that developed after Jesus’s execution.
* * *
I think this is probably enough for this week. I suspect that many of you are hearing about these many different strands of ancient Christianity for the first time. I know, when I first heard about this, I was kind of stunned and then amazed. The monolithic church that I received as a child turns out not to be a monolith at all, and it certainly didn’t start out that way. The monolithic appearance results from the “winners” of these theological battles writing the history. As a result, they get a chance to tout their own views and smear their opponents, sometimes even erasing them from the record. While this is not how I would have preferred things to develop, it is, sadly, our all-too-human propensity – both in religious and political history.
Next week, we will continue our exploration into the development of the early church. As I have explored in this area, I am continually amazed at the differences between what I thought was true and what is actually true. It is helping me understand that our faith is far more complex than I realized
Once again, I want to encourage you to practice your meditation daily. In our spiritual efforts, consistency matters greatly. I would rather see you meditate for five or 10 minutes every day rather than one big 30-minute session followed by nothing for the rest of the week.
That’s all for now. Remember that you are blessed in every way, today and always!
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
50: Looking Back and Looking Ahead
Edition #50: Inside the Invisible
Inside The Invisible has now been in existence for a little over a year. During that time, we have produced a weekly email newsletter focused on the topics of spiritual growth. We have grown from my initial list of 438 friends and colleagues to a subscriber list of over 7700. In this newsletter, I want to pause and take stock of what we have accomplished and give you a preview of where we are going.
The Enso. As you can see, our newsletter now has a fancy masthead and (to my eye) a nice professional look. The graphic on the left, which looks like the capital C, is actually an Enso, the Japanese symbol for Enlightenment. It symbolizes the ability to see ourselves and the world around us from a non-dual, or unitive, perspective, something that is very much needed today. As a symbol of unity, the Enso seems particularly appropriate for the content of our newsletter.
Over this last year, I have had the privilege of writing essays on the topics of spirituality and spiritual growth. These essays started off, kind of willy-nilly, as I addressed topics that I saw as spiritually confusing. My intent was to clarify some of the strange elements that have made their home under the umbrella of “spirituality.” The problem, as I saw it, was a jumble of often contradictory ideas which typically lead people to stuck places. Stuckness, though, is the opposite of the freedom that genuine spirituality promises us.
* * *
About three months ago I began to look at this collection of essays in a different way. It was as if my writing had surfaced many of the major components that are necessary for genuine spiritual development. Once these pieces were clearly identified, I began to see the patterns that connected them. This was hugely exciting!
These emerging patterns suggested that we could create a graduated program for spiritual development. Something that was beyond the capabilities of our weekly newsletter. Thinking on this further, and after talking with several spiritual friends about this matter, we decided that the most productive pathway would be through a website. Using a web-based platform, we could offer clear sequenced instruction on the elements of the spiritual life. The more we explored this, the more exciting this opportunity appeared.
This is what we are working on now. We hope to have the website ready for an initial release sometime around early May this year. (If history is any guide, that means we will open sometime after July 4! LOL) Kasey Leedom is collaborating with us and is designing this beautiful new site. As the pieces get put in place, one after another, the pattern is clarifying even further. The freedom that Jesus and all of the great spiritual avatars have promised us seems increasingly in reach.
* * *
To date, I have asked nothing of you, my subscribers. My wife and I have paid for the production and distribution of the Invisible newsletter from our retirement savings, and we are happy to do so. The costs of creating and maintaining the website, however, are beyond our financial capabilities.
While I intend to keep producing the Invisible newsletter free of charge, I will need to charge for access to the Invisible website. I don’t need to make any money from this endeavor. I do, however, need the website to pay for its own expenses.
We are working now on a preview site, to give you an idea of exactly what we are offering. You will be the first to find out when that site is ready and I think you’ll find two things. First, the beauty of the site will take your breath away and may well move you to tears. (The first time I saw it, I burst out crying!) Second, the sequencing of instruction is intuitively compelling. It is as if we have hit upon a heretofore hidden algorithm that opens the wonders of the spiritual world to us.
Now mind you, I am not Enlightened. I do not have the personal experiential knowledge necessary to bring you into full union with the Divine. I do, however, have some 70 years of discerning the path and then following where it leads. Along the way, I have found a number of methods for spiritual transformation that are very effective. It is these methods – taught step by step – that I will be able to share in our new website.
What this can do for you is clear away the fog, the superstitions, and the authoritarian nonsense offered by traditional religions. It also cuts through a lot of the nonsense offered by spiritual groups that have an incomplete understanding of the Way. I can show you how to reach the Presence of God within yourself. I can show you how to make your home there.
In an ideal world, each spiritual aspirant would find a teacher who could work with them individually, carefully guiding them directly and surely into the depths of Divine Love. Sadly, in the world in which we find ourselves, such spiritual elders are extremely difficult to find. What is worse, there is a proliferation of voices claiming to be this kind of wise elder. How can you tell the difference? And once you can discern the difference, how do you find such an elder?
The Invisible website will offer you an intensive course in the elements of spiritual development. Because we come to this endeavor at different levels of spiritual maturity, there will be several tracks to accommodate beginners all the way through those who are expert in these areas.
The study will be self-paced, which means there is no pressure on you to complete the coursework in any particular timeframe. In fact, because this kind of work is different from what you learned in school, the pacing is deliberately slow. The coursework revolves around learning with and through your heart, and this simply is not taught in the schools you have attended up to this point.
Finally, we plan to offer group spiritual direction over a zoom – like platform. This will allow for more individualized instruction, and will provide a platform to address the questions you might have.
So, I hope I have piqued your interest and generated some excitement.
* * *
And now I have something to ask of you. I have given freely to you for the past year by producing the Invisible newsletter. Here are two things you can do to help with our efforts.
First, could you send us a donation to help defray the expenses of setting up this website? You can send money through PayPal or Zelle using the codes below. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Zelle: send to Ken at the tag: inside-the-invisible
Second, could you send us the email addresses for one or two (or even more) of your friends and family who might enjoy our newsletter? If you have found these scribblings helpful, I suspect you have friends who are dear to you who would find the same benefit. So please, share what you yourself have enjoyed this past year with those you love.
You can send the addresses to: Ken123Kaisch@Google.com
* * *
That’s all for now. Remember to keep up your daily meditation practice and even more importantly, remember that you are blessed in every way, today and always!
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
49: Are You a Material Girl (or Boy)?
Edition #49: Inside the Invisible
A couple of weeks ago, I received an interesting question from Marianne. She asked what I thought about near death experiences. Specifically, she wondered if NDE’s were proof that our consciousness can exist without connection to the physical body, which is highly suggestive of life after death. It is even suggestive of immortality. As you can see, this is a profound question, and to answer it I’ve needed to take a couple of weeks to explore the subject more deeply.
For those of you who might not be familiar with the term, a near-death experience occurs, typically in an operating room or a hospital, when the patient “flat lines.” Because our medical technology has advanced so much in the last 50 years or so, we now have had many reports of these kinds of occurrences. During a surgery, or sometimes after some sort of extreme physical trauma, all of the patient’s vital signs disappear. In a word, these individuals physically die.
Dr. Raymond Moody was the first to recognize the importance of these phenomena, and he began the efforts to document cases and to explore them scientifically in the 1970s. We now have tens of thousands of reports from countries around the world. As a result, we can no longer dismiss these phenomena. There is just too much consistency between reports for any kind of dismissal to ring true.
Patients experiencing an NDE frequently report that they leave their body and find their conscious awareness floating above it. They are able to perceive what occurs to the body during their apparent ‘death:’ what the doctors and nurses are saying and doing, and even what is happening to family members in the building. Investigators of these experiences are often amazed at the wealth of detail that these so-called ‘dead’ people report.
While these reports are fascinating, the behavior changes that occur as a result of an NDE are even more extraordinary. Patients report losing any fear of dying – certainly a wonderful effect since many are so deeply afraid of dying!
More significantly, they also report (and are observed by others to experience) an increase in compassion, a decrease in materialism, a heightened moral sensitivity, a reduced ego reactivity, and a long-term value reorientation. These effects appear across cultures and persist for decades. Of note, these changes mirror the results of contemplative maturation.
* * *
Here’s what we actually know about NDE’s. First, they are not due to a single cause, but rather a result of many factors coming together. NDE’s reliably occur when the brain is under extreme stress, typically involving:
– Oxygen deprivation, either through hypoxia or ischemia.
– CO2 spikes.
– A disruption in the default mode network.
– A massive endogenous neurotransmitter release (including endorphins, serotonin, and possibly DMT.)
– A breakdown of multisensory integration (especially in the temporoparietal junction)
All of this produces the following experiences:
– Ego dissolution.
– Time distortion.
– A life review.
– Hyper meaning attribution.
– Perceived nonlocal awareness.
While these experiences are similar to those experiences developed from mystical contemplation, scientists have also shown that many of these NDE elements can be induced without imminent death. These include G–LOC in pilots, ketamine, meditation, and seizures.
* * *
So, what does all this mean? These data indicate that ordinary waking consciousness is a constrained operating mode. It does not encompass the full bandwidth of human awareness. You can think of this as a set of phenomena that parallels our experience of light. With light, we see only part of the full bandwidth; we are unable to see both the infrared and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum. (Not to mention x-rays, gamma rays, and the full array of other wildly exotic phenomena.)
Across cultures and across the many events that trigger NDE’s, they consistently show:
– The self is experienced as something other than the body.
– Identity can persist without a narrative continuity.
– Meaning can be perceived as intrinsic, not constructed.
– Fear of death is dramatically reduced over the long term.
– Ethical orientation shifts towards compassion and truthfulness.
These effects are structural rather than transient and emotional. Something significant happens that radically changes the person’s behavior. Longitudinal studies show that NDE’s result in long term stable personality change.
One criticism of this research is the claim that NDE’s are somehow an end-of-life hallucination and have no actual objective reality. If there were no long-term aftereffects from an NDE, this would be a plausible hypothesis. However, the data strongly suggest otherwise, because the long-term after-effects are disproportionate to the hallucination models. (Just ask any psychotherapy patient how easy it is to effect a long-term personality change!)
We may not fully understand what is happening with an NDE. But the data show us that something of utmost significance has happened, and the individuals who experience an NDE have their lives permanently changed for the better.
* * *
Here’s what I would like to believe: that NDE’s prove that human consciousness exists apart from our physical bodies. Unfortunately, NDE’s do not prove this. On the other hand, they do point very clearly to the fact that there is a lot more going on with consciousness than we are able to understand using the scientific tools at our disposal.
Perhaps the most interesting question that arises from the scientific study of NDE’s is: Why does consciousness become more coherent, meaningful, and structured when the brain is failing? Typically, one would expect the opposite: that when the brain fails, consciousness would become chaotic and unstructured, and there would be no positive long-term consequences should that failure somehow be arrested.
There are three hypotheses that are currently being explored to address this. In the first, the extreme-brain model, it is believed that the brain creates this state while it collapses. This model however does not explain the internal coherence of the phenomena that the dying person perceives, nor does it explain the long-term behavioral transformations that occur when the person survives.
The second model, called the filter-receiver model, states that the brain normally limits consciousness, but the crisis of dying loosens this filter so that the individual experiences more of the actual bandwidth of consciousness. The problem with this hypothesis is that it’s hard to test experimentally.
The third model might be termed the metaphysical model. Here the understanding is that consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality and our brains function simply to localize consciousness to a particular place, namely the body. As you might imagine, this is my preferred hypothesis. That said, how do you test it? One of the criteria for true scientific advance is that your hypothesis must be (potentially) disprovable. Sadly, the metaphysical model cannot be disproved at this point.
* * *
So where does all of this leave us? When you sit with these data for a while, what comes up is a rather startling conclusion, at least to my mind. The conclusion is this: that human identity is not as tightly bound to the ego, or to the internal narratives we create for ourselves, or to our physical/bodily self-representations as we have thought. In addition, the loosening of these three methods of binding reliably produces both ethical and spiritual maturation.
These conclusions are totally consonant with our spiritual work here. The great religious traditions agree that our sense of self, our ego, is a very limiting construct. Indeed, there comes a time when that ego-construct holds us back and keeps us from developing our full potential.
There is a further implication in these data. While we cannot prove this with the scientific tools we have available, it seems highly likely that consciousness is far more primary than we have thought. We have thought that matter and energy were the building blocks of our perceived reality. These data suggest rather strongly, in my view, that consciousness is the fundamental “stuff” of which reality is made.
* * *
Well, I think I will leave you here to ponder. I have about come to an end of being able to wrap my mind around these data. In a word, I need a break! Please continue your daily meditation practice and your own personal explorations of consciousness. Who knows? Maybe one day soon you will wake up to Reality and be able to give us the definitive answers the rest of us are searching for.
Remember that you are blessed in every way, today and always!
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
48: What Enlightenment Is Not
Edition #48: Inside the Invisible
Today, I would like to conclude our exploration of Enlightenment. For the past three weeks, we have looked at both the nature and the attributes of the Enlightenment, focusing especially on the formulation described by David Hawkins, a 21st-century American physician who wrote extensively about the spiritual journey. We have contrasted Hawkins' views with those of Theravadan Buddhists to arrive at a clear understanding of this important concept.
On the face of it, it would seem reasonable to focus our inquiry just around the Theravadan view. After all, this is the earliest description of Enlightenment that we possess, and it appears to come directly from the words of Gautama, the Buddha himself. Ahh… if only life were so simple!
The problem with the Theravadan descriptions is that they are all but incomprehensible to the contemporary American reader. For example, the Visuddhimagga describes the first Enlightenment state, Change-of-lineage Knowledge, as “the state where the object of awareness is the signless, no-occurrence, no-formation, cessation that is Nirvana.”
Could someone please explain to me what these words mean? I know the lexical meaning of each of these words, but taken together they are incomprehensible. Or how about this description of the next Enlightenment state: “The base consisting of neither perception-nor-non-perception, which has the function of exploding all greed, hate, and illusion and extinguishing all suffering.” I have no clue what “perception-nor-non-perception” means, and I have absolutely no idea how it explodes greed, hate, and suffering.
As we explored in previous weeks, there appear to be multiple points of contact between the Theravadan view and the view that Hawkins presents. There are also significant differences: while they both describe an inward journey that leads to the establishment of non-dual consciousness, Buddhism describes the process as freeing the self from desire. Hawkins, on the other hand, describes the process as one of surrender or letting go. From my point of view, this sounds like a difference of perspective rather than a substantive difference. In either case, from both perspectives, the sense of self or ego is relinquished.
I often find it helpful to clarify what a new term or concept is not. Typically, this deepens my understanding and helps me place the new concept in relation to other things I know. So, our task for today is to explore what Enlightenment is not.
~~~
The first thing Enlightenment is not is a state of emotional ecstasy or bliss. There are, in fact, blissful states leading up to Enlightenment, but Enlightenment itself does not result in such a blissful state. In fact, in many cases, the enlightened one returns to ordinary functioning in the world, albeit from a vastly different perspective than our ordinary consciousness allows.
Important for American Christians to understand, Enlightenment does not entail moral superiority. Evangelical Christians, for example, tend to equate a spiritual life with moral perfection. While both Buddhists and Hawkins discuss the importance of ethical behavior, neither understands Enlightenment in moral terms. For both, moral behavior provides a stable base for spiritual advancement. While a stable moral base is useful, it is not a sufficient condition for Enlightenment.
Many of the great teachers of our present age seem to be ordinary people who come from ordinary families. It appears that Enlightenment does not bestow on them a sense of constant happiness. It does not confer business or commercial success. As far as I know, no enlightened person has ever achieved the kind of financial success enjoyed by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or others like them.
In fact, one of the most profound enlightened beings of the 20th century, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, was a petty shopkeeper in Bombay. Maharajah was a heavy smoker and died of throat cancer in 1981 at the age of 84. From his experience, it seems clear then that Enlightenment does not confer business success, the habits of clean living, or the avoidance of death.
Neither does Enlightenment free people from the sorts of psychological trauma that develop in ordinary families. They are just like us: ordinary human beings with all of the frailties that that implies. While some may find this disappointing, I am quite encouraged by it. I, too, come from an ordinary family, and I, too, have experienced the same kind of psychological trauma that everyone else has. The good news is that people like me are not shut out from these deep states of spiritual realization.
Finally, Enlightenment does not confer some special sort of social functioning. Enlightened beings are not necessarily graceful socially. Often, they are quite awkward in social situations. From my perspective, this is to be expected. Given the deference that tends to be accorded to enlightened individuals, e.g., the Dalai Lama, I would expect them to behave in socially awkward or maladaptive ways. If a crowd of people surrounded you, waiting on you hand and foot, you would be socially awkward, too.
~~~
I would like to conclude this essay by discussing how Enlightenment comes about. In this, I am following the writings of Hawkins. From Hawkins’ perspective, Enlightenment is not an action that we take. It is not something that we can do. It is not something to be achieved.
Instead, Enlightenment occurs with a radical letting go, a profound surrender. This surrender entails releasing our habit of positional thinking and letting go of our ego. As we have explored in previous essays, our ego-based, positional way of thinking occurs when the mind attaches itself to beliefs, opinions, and identities, and then defends these positions as if they were the self. To be enlightened, one must forgo the dubious pleasures of judgment. In practice, this means letting go of concepts such as ‘good and bad,’ ‘right and wrong,’ etc.
In Hawkins’ framework, positional thinking has several defining characteristics. First, there is an identification with a particular viewpoint. The person somehow magically becomestheir position rather than holding a position provisionally. We see examples of this every time someone says, “I am right” or “This is who I am.”
A second characteristic of positional thinking is the use of binaryframing, which is totally consonant with a dualistic worldview. Reality, here, is reduced to right/wrong, true/false, us/them. By employing this maneuver, all nuance is lost; everything is reduced to a ‘this’ or a ‘that.’ The tragedy inherent in this maneuver is that the person thinks they fully understand the situation. However, by eliminating all nuance, they have precluded any possibility of real understanding.
A third characteristic of positional thinking is its emotional charge. Positions are energized by pride, fear, anger, or desire for control. Disagreement feels like a personal threat. In response to perceived threats, we characteristically become defensive. When this occurs, we become resistant to reality-based evidence. New information is filtered or rejected if it destabilizes the position.
Finally, positional thinking becomes a great source of suffering. Our attachment to positions generates both internal tension and interpersonal conflict. For some reason, we seem unable to identify our positional thinking as a major source of our discomfort and suffering. As a result, we often feel trapped in a hamster cage, running faster and faster until the momentum finally overtakes us and we collapse.
Hawkins contrasts positional thinking with non-positional awareness, which emerges at higher levels of consciousness and is characterized by openness, humility, and the capacity to see multiple perspectives without defensiveness.
In short, positional thinking is the ego mistaking its opinions for reality – and then fighting to survive through them.
~~~
I suspect I have given you more than enough to chew on for the week. The point of these essays is to prepare you for the actual work of perceiving our bare, unvarnished awareness. By exploring spiritual concepts such as Enlightenment, positional thinking, and related ideas, we are developing the vocabulary we need to engage in our actual spiritual work. It’s important, therefore, not to mistake these intellectual formulations as our main task. If you will, these essays are like prerequisites to a college course. They won’t give you the “real stuff,” but they will prepare you for understanding the real material when you experience it.
I hope that you continue with your daily meditations, and that your reflections on the matters presented here continue to deepen. You’ll find, I think, that reading and rereading these essays will significantly deepen your understanding of these spiritual matters. Together, we will find our hearts opening. Together, we will find ourselves enfolded in God’s most marvelous Love.
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
47: The Attributes of Enlightenment
Edition #47: Inside the Invisible
For the past several weeks, we have focused on that mysterious end point of the spiritual journey – Enlightenment. This term was first introduced into the spiritual literature by Gautama, the Buddha. The term ‘Buddha’ literally means “the Awakened One.” We began our conversation by comparing the original formulation of Enlightenment with that of the contemporary American spiritual writer, Dr. David Hawkins. Last week, we looked at the nature of Enlightenment, and this week, we will focus on some of its attributes.
~~~
In my mind, the most striking attribute of Enlightenment is the perception of the underlying unity of Creation through non-dual awareness. Because all language is built on the subject–object duality, non-dual awareness is, of necessity, an awareness without words. This means that an enlightened person’s perception is immediate, direct, and unmediated by language. In this frame of reference, the observer and the observed are identical. While the enlightened one is still able to perceive separate entities, the deeper perception is one of underlying unity.
~~~
This brings us to the second attribute of Enlightenment, which is the absence of a sense of self, the absence of an ego. The very idea of this is frightening to many in our current culture. The question always seems to arise, “Who would I be if I were not myself?” It seems clear that stepping out of our customary personal frame of reference is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to imagine.
From our earliest memories, our personal self has organized all of our experiences. Our self is the glue that holds together our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and memories. Taken together, these elements of our personal experience result in a sense of ourselves as the ‘doer’ of our actions. In addition to this sense of ourselves as agents, able to cause a variety of things to happen, there is also an internal narrative of ‘me.’ But, when the causal structure underlying the ego has been dismantled, the ego is seen for what it is – an illusion.
Our personal self is clearly limited. We are limited in our sensory abilities; for example, we can only experience our surrounding environment through our five senses. In ordinary consciousness, we have no direct access to the thoughts, emotions, or sensations of another person. Enlightenment appears to erase many, if not all, of these boundaries. There are many examples in the spiritual literature of holy people who can perceive the thoughts and emotions of others.
~~~
With Enlightenment, the person is consciously participating in a unitive consciousness, in the awareness of All-That-Is. Our usual perceptual boundaries appear to be erased, and consciousness extends far beyond our ordinary limits. Of note, this consciousness extension appears to be effortless. The enlightened person is not trying or striving at this point; rather, these extensions appear to fall into the category that C.G.Jung described as synchronicities. Whatever the enlightened one needs at the moment – information, healing, or whatever – is spontaneously supplied through participation in this extended Awareness.
This attribute of effortlessness is important for the spiritual aspirant to understand. Enlightenment is not attained by striving, by seeking, or by effort. This understanding is directly opposed to the understanding of almost every spiritual aspirant who has ever existed! But when you think it through, it makes perfect sense.
From the perspective of unitive consciousness, the perspective of All-That-Is, there is nothing to learn – everything is already known, so learning is a meaningless concept. From the perspective of All-That-Is, there is nothing to strive for – it has already been achieved.
Right now, as I write this, the words of a long-forgotten Zen teacher whose lecture I attended some fifty years ago are rambling through my head. He said, “There is nothing to attain.” When I heard this, I remember thinking, “Hogwash! If there is nothing to attain, what’s the point of your teaching and my being here?” Oops! Once again, it looks like the joke is on me.
Back to our point. If there is nothing to achieve, then our spiritual practice does not ever reach a final culmination, some great “A-ha” moment. This is not to say that Enlightenment is never reached, or that the various spiritual practices we employ have no value.
Clearly, our disciplined practice changes our lives in many important ways. We become more focused, more loving, more compassionate, and more engaged with what is actually real rather than our projections and fantasies. A whole host of important benefits! But while our practice prepares us for the spiritual transformation of Enlightenment, it can never actually result in our Enlightenment. Why? Because there is nothing to attain. Because, in the non-dual environment, there is no cause-and-effectas we expect. Because the Kingdom of Heaven is already inside of us.
From the non-dual perspective, the universe is a continuous, self–unfolding, self-revealing unity. From this perspective, it seems clear that the universe did not come into being with a Big Bang. While the Big Bang makes sense from our conventional, linear perspective, it makes no sense at all from a non-dual perspective. (Rather than address this now, I will come back to this point in the future newsletter.)
Of note, the perception that there is nothing to attain is congruent with the teachings of every advanced spiritual teacher I have ever met. From the perspective of unitive consciousness, we are already there. We are already Enlightened. From our perspective, however, we have yet to experience this. Talk about the ultimate in frustrating experiences! It’s like having a billion dollars in a secret bank account that we know nothing about, while we scramble about to put food on the table. But I digress…
~~~
Along with the idea that there is nothing to attain, there is an end to the internal struggles we typically have. To my mind, this is one of the more significant attributes of Enlightenment. Because the enlightened one is in touch with All-That-Is, there is no internal conflict. In the face of Enlightenment, all moral struggles dissolve because the individual understands completely why something happens. Instead of choosing between two options, the enlightened one's actions arise spontaneously in complete harmony with Reality. Thus, there is no ‘decision-making’ in the conventional sense.
~~~
Another attribute of Enlightenment is the absence of fear. Our fears are rooted in our sense of vulnerability. We have an image of ourselves that we work hard to protect. We want others to see us as strong or smart or pretty or powerful or… you fill in the blank. When someone challenges our self-perception, we typically get defensive very quickly. This defensiveness is rooted in our fear – our fear that we won’t belong, that we won’t fit in, that we won’t be connected. So we get angry to protect ourselves, and this anger often results in the too-frequent wars we engage in.
But, if there is no sense of an individual self, then there is nothing that can be afraid. There is no conflict in All-That-Is; there is simply a spontaneous self-unfolding. The apparent conflicts we see – between individuals, groups, and countries – are the result of past karma working itself out. (More on this in another newsletter.)
~~~
This brings us to another attribute of Enlightenment, the sense of inviolability. Because the enlightened one finds herself connected with all of Reality, nothing can threaten or diminish such a one. There is no loss, there is no illness, and there is no death that has any existential impact.
The individual self can experience loss, and frequently does. But when the self recognizes its true nature, not as an individual unit, but as participating fully in the greater whole, in All That Is, how can there possibly be any loss?
To make this point, let’s walk through an example. Let’s say a person you dearly love dies. From the dualistic perspective – the perspective of an individual self – you have incurred a terrible loss. Your beloved is no longer here; he is no longer accessible. You feel a terrible emptiness as a result.
From an awareness of the underlying unity, however, there has been no significant change. The form of your beloved has changed, of course, but this is simply part of the spontaneous unfolding of Creation. (In actual fact, all of our forms are constantly changing as our cells in our bodies die and are replaced – spontaneously.) Your beloved's underlying awareness – their loving presence – is still present and available to you. As a result, the enlightened one experiences no sense of loss.
~~~
This brings us to what is perhaps the most important attribute of Enlightenment. Dr. Hawkins describes the fundamental quality of Reality as Love. This seems to align with the teachings of many other great spiritual teachers. But Hawkins' understanding of love is significantly different from our conventional understanding.
Conventionally, love is considered an emotion. This emotion is directed here or there, and is limited and circumscribed by boundaries. For example, we love this one and that one, but the ones over there, we despise. Hawkins' view is quite different. He states that Love is the nature of Reality itself. It is not directed at certain individuals and withheld from others. Rather, it is an impersonal field of positive, beneficent regard. It does not imply either warmth or kindness. It is simply the nature of Reality. It is what Is.
~~~
Well, enough for today. I don’t know how you feel after reading this, but I am exhausted by the effort of trying to think through what Enlightenment actually means, and the various aspects and implications surrounding this topic. Next week, I will focus on what Enlightenment is not. I often find it helpful, when trying to understand something, to explore what that something is not.
Thank you for bearing with me in this process. I feel a sense of your presence and your interest in these topics, and that perception supports me as I try to dive deeper and deeper. I’m deeply grateful for your continued interest and would ask that you keep me in your prayers.
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
46: The Nature of Enlightenment
Edition #46: Inside the Invisible
Last week, we addressed the question, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ We explored the origins of this term as described by its originator, Gautama, the Buddha. We then contrasted the Buddha's understanding of Enlightenment with that of David Hawkins, an American physician who wrote extensively about spiritual matters.
I chose Hawkins’ work for comparison because his understanding of Enlightenment seems to take the Buddha’s understanding, formulated some 2500 years ago in a different culture, and updated it using a modern conceptual framework. The Buddhist formulation is all but incomprehensible to us. What does it really mean, saying that “Nirvana (is) the signless, no-occurrence, no-formation, cessation?” Hawkins appears, in my mind, to have described Enlightenment in terms that are more accessible to contemporary readers. Since my purpose in these scribblings is to make explicit the spiritual nature that underlies our observable reality, Hawkins’s work seemed like a natural fit for our purposes.
So, this week, I would like to drill down into the nature of Enlightenment. I would like to use this opportunity to explore the defining attributes of Enlightenment as Hawkins understands them. This, I believe, will shine a spotlight on what the Enlightenment is and illuminate what is necessary to experience this state.
~~~
There are a number of assumptions that underlie Hawkins' understanding of Enlightenment. Foremost among them, he sees consciousness as the primary “stuff” out of which all else comes to be. This is the opposite of our commonly accepted worldview. Almost everyone sees matter as ontologically primary. The common view is that somehow consciousness emerges from non-conscious, inert matter. This is referred to in scientific circles as “the hard problem of consciousness.” Holders of this view are, to date, unable to explain how consciousness is derived from inert matter.
What is fascinating about Hawkins’ view is that quantum physics seems to be quietly exploring this hypothesis. Beginning with Max Planck and other notable physicists in the 20th century, the notion has been floated that the universe is more like “an idea in the mind of God” than a physical structure built from small bits of material stuff. To my ears, “an idea in the mind of God” sounds suspiciously like consciousness. It does not sound at all like the Newtonian model of the world that most of us have learned in school.
A second assumption underlying Hawkins’ view is that Enlightenment is a permanent ontological shift, not a psychological state or a peak experience. This perception is based on Hawkins' own personal experience. On this point, Hawkins' view appears to be exactly the same as the Theravadin view.
The Buddhists describe several differentiated Enlightenment states. They describe a Change–of–lineage state in which Nirvana, the “signless, no-occurrence, no-formation, cessation” is experienced. A further development is the second Enlightenment state, where there is “neither perception-nor-non-perception, and which has the function of exploding all greed, hate, and delusions, and the extinguishing of all suffering.” This third Enlightenment state, Fruition Consciousness, is a state of full Enlightenment, and it is marked by the complete cessation of consciousness. The attainment of this state marks a permanent change in the consciousness of the enlightened one.
Of note, Theravadan Buddhists do not define Enlightenment as a “state.” They would never say, “You have entered into a permanent altered state of consciousness.” Instead, they would say that a causal structure (i.e., seeing the world as a series of cause-and-effect relationships) has been dismantled, meaning that certain mental processes, such as identification with the ego or a sense of self, can no longer occur. Thus, Enlightenment is not a state that has to be maintained. It is permanent.
On this point, both Hawkins and the Buddhists agree: the shift to Enlightenment is permanent. There is no going back to a lesser or more primitive state of consciousness. There is an important implication hidden in these data. It means that Enlightenment is not a psychological state or a peak experience, as some have surmised. Psychological states and peak experiences come and go; Enlightenment is permanent.
Moreover, after the final Enlightenment state, it requires no further effort on the practitioner's part. In other words, Enlightenment doesn’t have to be maintained. As mentioned above, Enlightenment is permanent, meaning it goes far beyond the variability of states and experiences.
~~~
In Hawkins’ understanding, Enlightenment is the collapse of the identification with the personal ego, the sense of “I” or “me.” In its place, the individual opens to a universal Awareness – an awareness of All-That-Is. From the perspective of this universal Awareness, there is no longer a distinction between subjects and objects. The dualistic world collapses as one perceives the underlying unity, which binds everything together. Instead of the separation implied by dualism, Reality is experienced as self-luminous, complete, and impersonal.
Again, this is very similar to the Theravadan formulation, which speaks about the dismantling of the causal structure of the ego. While the ego develops in every human being from birth, it structures the world as a series of dualities. Inherent in these dualities is the notion of causality – that “something” causes this other “something” to happen. With the removal of the ego and its inherent perception of duality, the underlying unity stands revealed.
Here, both Hawkins and the Buddhists appear to depart somewhat from a traditional Christian perspective. While the Christian notion of theosis is very similar to that of Hawkins, Christians see this union as highly personal. It is the unification of the individual with the Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hawkins’ notion of uniting with an impersonal Unity is clearly different.
Despite these apparent differences, there may be an underlying unity between these two views. At this point, we have no way of controlling for the differences between the worldviews of Jesus’s time and those of contemporary America. It seems within the realm of possibility that this difference – the difference between a personal and an impersonal conclusion to the spiritual quest – is simply a matter of culture or point of view.
While we are trying to describe what Enlightenment is, it’s also helpful to be clear about what Enlightenment is not. Enlightenment is not a state of emotional bliss or ecstasy. While there are blissful states that occur during the spiritual journey, bliss is not a notable part of its conclusion.
In the same way, Enlightenment is not a particular set of cognitive insights. While a cognitive understanding of the spiritual journey is typically very helpful during the process, changing one’s ideas does not bring one to Enlightenment. This understanding is particularly helpful at the present time. With the wide accessibility of the Internet, there are thousands of “ideas” about Enlightenment floating around. For our purposes, it’s enough to understand that none of these ideas will bring us to that blessed state.
Finally, Enlightenment is not a state of moral perfection. Given the traditional Christian emphasis on moral behavior, this is a very important distinction. While moral behavior facilitates the spiritual journey, it is neither its driver nor its end state.
~~~
I think I will stop here; I have probably given you enough to think about for this week. Next week, I will continue this conversation by focusing on the attributes of the Enlightenment. Until then, I hope you keep up with your meditation practice. I have come to believe that we practice not just for ourselves, but for each other as well. None of us travels the spiritual path by ourselves. Just knowing that you are meditating and going deeper encourages me to keep going too. I look forward to realizing, with all of you, that wonderful moment of union with the Divine.
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
45: What Is Enlightenment?
Edition #45: Inside the Invisible
One of the terms widely bandied about in spiritual circles is ‘Enlightenment.’ The term seems self-explanatory, and from the perspective of the ordinary listener, it concerns the attainment of knowledge. In the past, you might have been in darkness, but with enlightenment, you are now able to see the truth clearly, free from ignorance, prejudice, and superstition. When used in a spiritual sense, however, Enlightenment is a technical term with a very specific meaning, depending on the authority to which you might appeal.
In my understanding, the term ‘Enlightenment’ came into the spiritual vocabulary through the teachings of Gautama, the Buddha. There are at least four major schools of Buddhism, but for the purposes of our exploration, we will use the writings of the earliest school, Theravada, to return to the understanding of this process that is likely closest to the Buddha’s original meaning. Theravadin Buddhism understands Enlightenment as the progressive dismantling of the causes of suffering and the awakening to Nirvana.
The key to understanding this Theravadin concept lies in the Buddha's proclamation of the Four Noble Truths.
This is an absolutely stunning analysis of our common human dilemma, the problem of suffering. The Four Noble Truths are:
1. What is the Holy Truth of Ill? Birth is ill, decay is ill, sickness is ill, death is ill. To be conjoined with what one dislikes means suffering. To be disjoined from what one likes means suffering. Not getting what one wants also means suffering. In short, all grasping at any of the five scandals (i.e., the aggregates from which the phenomenal world is formed) involves suffering.
2. What, then, is the Holy Truth of the Origination of Ill? It is that craving that leads to rebirth, accompanied by delight and greed, seeking its own delight, now, here, now there, i.e., craving for sensuous experience, craving to perpetuate oneself, craving for extinction.
3. What, then, is the Holy Truth of the Stopping of Ill? It is the complete stopping of that craving, the withdrawal from it, the renunciation of it, throwing it back, liberation from, non-attachment to it.
4. What, then, is the Holy Truth of the steps that lead to the stopping of Ill? It is the holy eight–fold Path, which consists of: right views, right intentions, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
As you can see from this extensive definition, for the Theravada, Enlightenment is a comprehensive program that involves reprogramming your view of the world, your intentions, along with a variety of behavioral changes, and learning specific spiritual practices to focus your attention. This process is said to result in the extinction of the ‘fires that drive suffering.’ It involves the eradication of specific ‘defilements and fetters,’ which obscure the perception of Reality.
In contrast with theistic religions, this process does not necessitate prayer or an appeal to the Divine. It is focused on the cessation of suffering and an escape from conditioned existence. It understands the ego as a major obstacle because it binds us to our self-imposed suffering. It uses vipassana, a form of insight meditation, to see the impermanence of the phenomenal world, including the ultimate nonexistence of the self (or ego).
In the Theravadin view, only when the practitioner can cut off his desires will he be able to escape the delusions of the phenomenal world. At this point, the sense of self or ego will dissolve, and the person will perceive Reality directly. This is the state of Enlightenment and final liberation.
~~~
Now, one of my failings (or strengths) is that I’m something of a skeptic. When someone tells me something, especially something important, I typically look for evidence that will either confirm or disprove whatever it is that is being presented. In the case of Enlightenment, my skepticism is somewhat problematic, since I am not enlightened myself. As a result, I cannot verify the Theravadin understanding of Enlightenment with my own experience.
To address this, I find it useful to contrast the Theravadin view with that of David R. Hawkins (1927-2012). Hawkins, a physician, psychoanalyst, and psychologist, has written extensively about a series of major shifts of consciousness over the course of his life. In Hawkins' understanding, Enlightenment is an advancement of consciousness, such that one’s sense of separateness is transcended and the personal self or ego is no longer taken as the locus of identity. It is a state of “perfection, bliss, effortlessness, and oneness,” a “state of non-duality beyond separateness and beyond the intellect.”
For Hawkins, Enlightenment is realized through the pathway of surrender or letting go. The practitioner progressively relinquishes her inner resistance, which includes her attachments, aversions, and prideful control. As this occurs, there is a progressive release from dualistic thinking. As the dualistic lens through which all data is filtered slowly dissolves, one is able to discern the Divine more and more clearly. Hawkins uses a variety of synonyms for God, including Truth, Reality, and Love, which I find convenient labels for different aspects of the Divine.
~~~
There appear to be many commonalities between these two descriptions of Enlightenment. They both speak of Enlightenment as a unitive or non-dual state – a perspective from which one perceives the unity which underlies our apparent separation, our apparent duality. Both speak of an inward journey, which culminates in this non-dual perspective. While the Buddhist works at freeing the self from desire, Hawkins describes the process as “letting go.” As I reflect on this, it sounds like two different perspectives on the same phenomenon.
Both perspectives view the ego as an obstacle because it necessarily divides the world into a series of dualities. That is, it takes the underlying unity of existence and chops it into ‘this’ and ‘that,’ into ‘good’ and ‘bad.’
Both perspectives describe what happens as the self is relinquished. The Buddhists describe it as a ‘liberation’ from the sense of self. Specifically, the Buddhist view sees our notion of a separate self as a fetter, a chain, which binds us to a delusional understanding of ourselves and the world around us. This liberation from the ego and its desires arises from insight (vipassana), which is grounded in the direct experience of impermanence and non-self (anatta).
Hawkins, through his process of letting go, describes the ego as dissolving into Oneness. That is, one’s identity shifts from ‘Me–Me–Me’ and moves into a union with the Divine, which is described as an impersonal consciousness. Of note, Hawkins' many descriptions of this process are clearly theistic and explicitly point to God.
In both perspectives, the practitioner enters a profound stability of consciousness. The customary turbulence of our desires no longer moves us. In this enlightened state, one appears to enter into union with all that is. As a result, there can be no duality, no good or bad, right or wrong. Everything that is … is just what it is. As a result, there is no striving and no goals to reach. For Hawkins, the practitioner perceives the world as organically moving in synch with itself. Rather than progressing through time or space, the world simply unfolds itself to itself.
Of interest, both the Buddhist and the Hawkins’ perspective are based on a profound ethical transformation. The understanding that appears to underlie this perspective is that only a deeply ethical person will develop the inner stability necessary to sustain the deep concentration necessary for meditation. To this end, the Buddhists have developed a formal path for ethical transformation.
Hawkins, on the other hand, views this ethical transformation as a continuum. He has mapped an emotional continuum that describes this transformation. At the lowest state of consciousness, the individual is overwhelmed by guilt and shame. This gradually transforms into the courage necessary to face one’s difficulties, the acceptance of those difficulties, and the transformation of these difficulties through love, peace, and joy. Through this progression, practitioners let go of the ego's separation and find their true identity with the Divine.
~~~
Both points of view describe a profound awakening that involves deep peace, less grasping for one’s desires, and a radical shift in identification away from the reactive self. Hawkins describes this inner peace as arising from an effortless non-duality. The Buddhist view describes a series of discrete inner states as one progressively releases their grip on desire. As we relinquish our desires, the ego becomes less and less necessary. As a result, the ego's dualistic perception dissolves, and one enters into a state of unity, both within oneself and with the surrounding world.
This state of Enlightenment is, I believe, the ultimate goal for every human being.
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
44: Our Unreal Reality
Edition #44: Inside the Invisible
Over the past month or so, we have enjoyed some fascinating excursions. We have explored our awareness, discovering through our own experience that our awareness extends into the Awareness of God. We have examined that splendid survival tool, the ego, the Swiss Army knife of all survival tools. This week, I would like to bring us back to earth and firmly anchor our feet on the ground.
So, take off your shoes and socks, and put your feet directly on the floor. If it’s warm enough, go outside and dig your feet into the earth. You’re touching the ground, right?
We think we're touching the ground, but we're not. To explain this is going to take a little while, so please bear with me. It is actually very important. Let’s start by looking at whatever you managed to learn about matter in high school or college. Let me start by saying that everything you learned there is wrong. It’s a lie. You were misled.
We were taught that matter is composed of atoms, tiny, discrete particles of stuff, commonly known as protons, electrons, and neutrons. These assertions are a pack of lies. When you actually look at these so-called particles, you find that they are actually vibrating packets of energy.
You can drill down even farther if you wish, and the farther you go, the smaller these packets of energy get. At this point in our understanding of the nature of matter, scientists have labeled the smallest packets of energy as quarks and gluons. Physicists hypothesize that there are even smaller packets of energy, but for our purposes, there’s no need to go any further.
So, let’s look at what this all means. When we put our bare feet on the floor, we think we're touching the floor. In actual fact, our feet are composed of vibrating packets of energy, and the floor is composed of another set of vibrating packets. These energetic forces actually push against each other, repelling one another. The sensations that we identify as “touch” are actually the sensations associated with being repelled. How’s that for a head twister? And that’s just for starters!
Let’s look at Time. We all take time for granted. There was yesterday, there is right now, and there will probably be a future tomorrow. And all of this is simply misguided nonsense. Let me show you how…
Let’s start with the present moment, because we know, through our own lived experience, that it exists. We also know that the past no longer exists; it’s over and done with. At best, we may have some memories of past events, but we know the past is over. That means it no longer exists.
In a similar way, we know that the future doesn’t exist because the future hasn’t happened yet. How could something exist if it hasn’t happened?
So, we commonly think that the only thing that's really real is the present moment. But let me ask you this: if there is no past and no future, what does that mean about the present? We define the present as that which exists between the past and the future. If those don’t exist, then perhaps the present moment doesn’t exist either. At the very least, it means that our understanding of the present is most likely false.
We commonly think of time as a kind of stately progression, almost like the slow movement of the Zodiac through the heavens. There is a set of future possibilities that come into sight, that exist for a moment in the present, and then gradually recede into the past. But if the past and future don’t exist, there is no stately procession. In fact, there is no procession at all!
Instead, if we are to be faithful to the data, there is only right now! If you will, a kind of Isness. Without a past or a future, perhaps the idea of time is simply of fantasy – a fantasy that we have found useful for survival. Just another tool, rather like the ego. It is a fantasy with no objective reality, yet it is one shared by almost every human being.
Since time apparently does not exist, this impacts other fantasies we have – fantasies like distance. In everyday language, time and distance are interconnected. They are linked by the notion of speed, also known as velocity. The equation that we learned in math and science classes looks like this: Distance = Time X Speed. But if there is no Time, this equation doesn’t work.
If Distance = Time X Speed, then Distance equals the value of Time (which is zero) multiplied by Speed. When you multiply anything by zero, the result is zero. By this logic, Distance doesn’t really exist. Pushing this further, if distance doesn’t exist, then we must not be living in a three-dimensional world. The three dimensions of height, width, and breadth apparently don’t really exist. These three dimensions are labels for distance, but if distance doesn’t exist, then the commonly accepted three-dimensional world around us must not exist either.
It starts to make you wonder, doesn’t it? These ideas we have held about the nature of reality begin to appear for what they really are: simple fabrications or fantasies. At best, they are intellectual constructs fabricated to help us negotiate the rigors of daily life. Yet, when you drill down into what actually constitutes the reality we live in, these ideas start to fall apart.
~~~
By now, I expect that you are thoroughly confused about what is real and what is not. I raise these points about our physical reality because there are many parallels between our understanding of the physical and our understanding of the spiritual.
In both cases, we have accepted a false dualistic paradigm. The most heart-wrenching consequence of this false paradigm is that we separate ourselves from the Divine. We believe that we are right here and God is somewhere else, usually someplace far, far away. We fantasize a vast abyss between God and us – an abyss that brings us infinite pain and suffering.
In the same way, we have fantasized about the nature of the material world around us. We have fantasized about the nature of matter, about the nature of time, and about the nature of distance. We have fantasized about our own human nature. And all of these fantasies, while intertwined, are erroneous.
If these errors were inconsequential, I wouldn’t bother to talk about them, but they are not. In both the physical and the spiritual realms, these errors have led us into dead ends. We cannot move forward until we learn to base our actions on the Truth.
So, let's look at that weirdo who refers to himself as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” (John 14.6) Just after Jesus says this, he goes on to say, “Just as I am in the Father and the Father is in me, so also, I am in you, and you are in me.” (John 14.20). This, among many other similar statements made by Jesus and the saints who followed him, clearly shows this most important spiritual understanding.
The Divine lives deep inside of each one of us! It doesn’t matter whether you are Christian or not. As far as we know, Jesus did not come to found the Christian church. He never talks about an organizational structure. He never talks about a creed or having to believe in a certain way. Rather, he came as ‘Rabbi,’ which means Teacher in Hebrew.
Furthermore, Jesus came to set us free – free from our too-narrow ideas about ourselves, free from the guilt and shame that we heap upon ourselves and each other. He invited us to follow him; he didn’t force us. And he didn’t force us to believe any of the deep spiritual truths that he revealed to us. Rather, he shared his truth – the Truth – and invited us to trust him.
St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, invites his readers to “put aside your childish ways and beliefs.” We are invited to look deeply within, where we will find that magnificent Presence we call God. We are invited to step away from the unreal reality that we have hallucinated:
To step away from the passage of time and to step into Eternity.
To step away from the distance we imagine that separates us from God.
To step away from the meager protections that our ego offers.
Instead, we are invited to step into our full stature as children of the Most High.
This “stepping into who we really are” is not dropping one set of beliefs for another. It’s not a matter of trying to hallucinate this Reality. Instead, it involves learning about the dimensions of the spiritual reality that underlies the physical reality we ordinarily perceive. As we learn about the beauty and awesome wonder of this deep reality, we learn to trust the teachings of the one who points it out to us. As our trust grows, we find ourselves walking this holy Way, just as the many others before us did. This Way involves learning to go deeply within ourselves so that we can actually experience the Reality that Jesus points to.
~~~
I think I should probably stop here. I am beginning to pontificate, and that is always a warning sign that I should just shut up. So let me encourage you to continue with your daily meditation. Go deeply inside, that is our spiritual destiny.
In a bit of good news for you. Several of us are working to put together a website that will allow for more graduated instruction in the spiritual life than a newsletter format allows. I plan to continue this free newsletter as long as I am able, but many of you have asked for more systematic instruction. A team has gathered around this possibility, and we hope to have an operating website early in 2026.
This website will focus on what we need to do to enter more fully into the Being of God. It will contain a full program for spiritual transformation. Specifically, it will provide a course of study that equips you with the intellectual knowledge you need to understand the spiritual life. This knowledge will provide the basis for specific life changes in yourself that will facilitate your inner transformation. As these transformations unfold, you will be introduced to deeper forms of meditation and contemplative prayer.
Taken together, we believe these are the necessary components for a deeply spiritual way of being. If you will, the graduated exercises we are preparing will move you into the Being of God.
That’s all for now. May God continue to bless you in every way!
With deep affection,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
43: Further Explorations Into the Ego
Edition #43: Inside the Invisible
In past newsletters, we have explored the idea that our egos are actually just tools – tools for our survival. We never think of them like this because they’ve always been around; we simply accept our sense of self, our ego, as a given. To understand this idea of the ego as a tool, we have to scrutinize its origins. So, let’s begin at the beginning.
Newborn babies don’t appear to have egos; they don’t have a discrete sense of self like you and I do. That sense of self is developed, bit by bit, in response to the social environment in which the child is raised. As a result, no two of us are alike.
Newborns are literally like sponges – they are immersed in an ocean of sensory data, and they soak up every bit of it. For example, they notice every little nuance on their parents' faces. They see muscles tightening and relaxing; they notice the flush or pallor in their skin – no detail escapes them.
They see these things because their survival depends upon it. They are stacking up piles of data, which they later use to make their way in the world. Did you know that the focal distance of a newborn's eyes is about 12 inches? That is exactly the distance between a nursing baby and her mother’s face.
As a child nurses, she focuses with great intensity and notices every little change on her mother’s face. These data are then correlated with the taste of mother’s milk and the tension or relaxation in the mother’s arms, and many other factors. Later in life, as the child gains greater autonomy, these data will be used to manipulate poor mom. The child will learn that a particular whiny tone gets one result, while another, less whiny tone produces something else, and a big smile gets still another kind of response.
An interesting and often overlooked consequence of this gradual construction of the ego is that it is present in some form or other from the child’s earliest memories. While every child begins with a simple, open awareness of what is, her gradually constructed ego starts to manifest from almost her first experiences. Because most of our memories are formulated after we acquire language, her earliest memories – most of which are composed through language – always entail a sense of self. In our memories, then, there has never been a time when the almighty “I” has not been present.
Think about this for a moment. Just like a fish doesn’t notice the water it’s swimming in, so too we don’t notice the ego that we are using. We don’t notice it because, in our memories, there has never been a time when we have been without our egos. We assume that having an ego is “natural,” and that everyone has a similar construct that appears to guide their behavior.
Another consequence of this kind of construction is that we typically have great difficulty imagining living without the ego. In effect, when I talk about going beyond the ego, it sounds like I’m suggesting that we live without our single most important survival tool. And that, sadly, sounds pretty scary for most of us.
And speaking of scary, how about the notion of death? Most of us have even greater difficulty imagining our self, our ego, ceasing to be. As a response to these deep fears, our culture hides from death by pushing elders into old folks' homes and making them disappear. We have funeral rituals in which the bodies of the deceased are dressed up and painted to look like they are still alive. We seemingly cannot bear the notion of our own ‘disappearance,’ so we have viewings of the dead body and talk amongst ourselves about “how natural he looks.”
And yet most of us disappear at least once a day! We even look forward to disappearing! We lay down on our beds every evening and go to sleep. Where does your sense of self go when you are asleep? What happens to it? It’s strange, isn’t it, because most of us enjoy going to bed and disappearing into sleep. Isn’t this the very same thing that happens at the end of life, when the body is no longer useful or effective? We even euphemistically refer to death as “going to sleep” or “resting.” So, what’s the big deal?
~ ~ ~
The spiritual journey we are exploring will take you to the point where you no longer need your survival tools. In effect, as we open to the Self that lies within, we are able to lay down the tools that the little self needed to survive. By gradually letting go of our litt\\
]And part of that destiny is recognizing the limitations of our egos. Part of it, then, involves letting go of the things that hold us back.
This constant cycle of learning something and then letting it go is one we are all familiar with. As infants, we first learned to roll and then to crawl. As we gained control of our bodies, we learned how to walk. Then came that great day when we learn to ride a tricycle or Hot Wheels. And then came a bicycle! And then came driving the family automobile! With each step, we gratefully relinquished the skill we had previously learned. And with each step, we gained more and more freedom and autonomy.
Now God is inviting you to step into even more freedom. The problem is, to do that, you have to let go of the ego, your sense of self. There comes a time when you recognize that your marvelous self has become a hindrance to your spiritual growth.
While this notion of letting go of who you are seems very frightening at the start of the journey, as you progress, you will find that it holds less and less fear for you.
~ ~ ~
This brings us to a critical question: How do we let go of our sense of self? It should be clear by now that this is not an easy or straightforward task. It is a task that will take most of us years to achieve, and perhaps several lifetimes if the Hindus and Buddhists are correct.
Thankfully, letting go is driven by a simple process we have used since birth. The process is one of meticulous observation. The spiritual path invites us to observe our ego, to watch it in all of its particulars. It invites us, as we observe, to notice the limits of our ego, and to notice how it constrains and limits our spiritual progress.
The ego was created to help us survive. It is a tool – nothing more and nothing less. That means that our sense of self, our precious “I,” is just a survival tool. It’s not special or precious. It’s just a tool like the screwdrivers and wrenches stored in your garage.
I know, this sounds shocking, doesn’t it? My precious “Me” is just a tool? Yup, that is all it is. But because we believe our sense of self is a possession, something that is “mine,” it takes on a sense of specialness, a sense of preciousness. Most of us have no idea what it would be like to live without this sense of self. And all of us are just a little bit afraid of what a life without self would be like.
Would it be safe? Would I be taken advantage of? Would I be able to jump out of the way if a car came careening down the sidewalk? These fears and many more arise as we begin our spiritual work. There are, however, several factors that give me confidence in going forward.
First of all, there is no force involved in letting go. God doesn’t demand that we let go, and he doesn’t force it upon anyone. This is one of the principles that you begin to notice as you explore a truly spiritual life. We start to see that God invites us, but always gives us the freedom to choose. In fact, this sense of freedom pervades every aspect of the spiritual life. The best example of this is found in the life of Jesus. Even Jesus, the son of God, was free to choose whether to go forward with the crucifixion or to back away.
Like Jesus, we too are God’s children, and we enjoy the same freedom of choice. Have you ever wondered why freedom is so important to human beings? Men and women throughout recorded history have been willing to lay down their lives for freedom. There is no higher price anyone can pay, but it is a price willingly paid by generation after generation. I believe freedom is so important to us because it reflects the Divine order. As a result, God gives us perfect freedom to choose what we want to do, and we naturally rebel when someone tries to take our freedom away.
As you begin this process of observing the ego, notice that all of your judgments and all of your positional thinking are driven by your ego. Have you ever wondered why we are constantly judging? Take a moment and look at the conversations you are having in your head. All of our judgments are somehow related to our survival. There is a constant stream of them, and it’s driven by our nonstop worrying. When you start to notice, you realize that all this mental activity is driven by the ego. What is more, most of it is totally unnecessary. Someday, you should try an experiment with yourself. Count up the number of worries that you have during any given day. At the end of the day, ask yourself how many of those worries actually came true. You’ll be shocked by your answer!
The next element necessary for letting go of our ego is learning to cultivate a radical kind of humility. Because we see our self as special and exceptional, we tend to think our thoughts are equally special. I don’t know about you, but around 98% of my thoughts are simply gossip and drivel! My sense of self vomits up a continual stream of thoughts that, for the most part, are unnecessary commentary and nonsense. The only value I see in most of my thinking is that it is a special kind of streaming format I find entertaining.
There is nothing whatsoever that is precious or exceptional about most of my thinking. When I do have a profound thought, it seems quite clear that it is not generated by my ego. While my survival thoughts are ego-driven, my deeper thoughts seem to come from the Self. I cannot, in honesty, claim them as my own.
Notice those times when you seem to transcend your ego. Those odd “synchronicities” that appear more and more frequently as you cultivate your spiritual knowing. Those times when you enter into the Zone, either in sports, in business, or in deep conversations with someone – conversations where you surprise yourself with the wisdom that comes from your lips. These are the times when you speak the most profound truths. I find myself surprised at what I’m saying during these times. I’m surprised because I recognize that it is not “me” who is doing the talking. It comes from that deeper Being who lives within us all.
We learn to let go as we accumulate more and more information about the Divine and about the spiritual dimension of life. This accumulation of data lets us know it’s okay to let go, that it’s safe to release our death-grip on safety. It’s always helpful to remember that God is on our side. The Divine has always been with us and has always been there to encourage and guide us. It is through humility and our willing submission to the extraordinary love of God that we find our way home.
Have a blessed day, and remember to enfold yourself in God’s love until we meet again.
Faithfully yours,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
42: The Second Deepening of Awareness
Edition #42: Inside the Invisible
Last week we focused on our habit of positional thinking. We explored how our judging creates fixed positions. As a result, we label things constantly – “this is good and that is bad,” “this is right and that is wrong.” It all seems so normal, doesn’t it?
Sadly, our positional thinking harms us in at least three ways. First, this kind of thinking gives us the illusion that we have some sort of power over the object of our judgment. For example, when I judge and say that a particular politician is acting badly, I place myself in a position over that person. This gives me the illusion that I have some kind of power in the situation. On reflection, it’s clear that this is just a fantasy.
Second, our positional thinking gives us a sense that we fully understand the situation that were judging. Yet, how often have any of us ever fully understood even the simplest situation? We rarely know all of the historical antecedents which give rise to a particular situation. We almost never understand the full results or consequences of a situation. Yet, we happily proceed in the fantasy that we understand things perfectly and that our judgment is the correct one. What amazing delusions we inhabit!
From my perspective, the most important and damaging consequence of our dualistic perception and positional way of thinking that it entails, is that it cuts us off from our Creator. It has the unintended consequence of creating an abyss between us and the Divine. Our positional thinking has us believe that we are ` here, and God is somewhere else, often conceived of as someplace very far from where we are.
What a wretched situation! What an intolerable price to pay!
~~~
As followers of Jesus, we cannot in good conscience allow this state of affairs to continue unchallenged. So, to remedy this, we focus in meditation on the non-dual bridge which connects us with the Divine. We focus on that lively awareness that undergirds all of our experience.
Let me explain what I mean here. Right now, you are reading these words on your screen. Your focus is “out there,” and you perceive these words of mine as having some kind of reality. In a word, they exist.
You exist also – also as a reality. You experience your physical sensations, and you notice your thoughts change as you read these words. So now we have two different kinds of reality – the words on the screen and your experience of yourself.
Going deeper, notice what experiences all of this. It is your awareness – that lively part of you that notices and experiences the multiple streams of experience that flow through your consciousness. This awareness is non-dual in nature. It holds everything that you are aware of in a unitive kind of experience.
Now, go deeper still. When we release our dualistic thinking, when we let go of our dualistic perceptions, we discover that we are connected with everything that is. We are connected with all the parts of ourselves – the many constituent elements that make us who we are. As we dive into this internal unity, we find that we are connected with all of the people around us – the ones we hate and the ones we love, and even the ones we don’t see because of our judgments and positional thinking.
If we continue in this deep dive, we find that we are connected with Jesus, our blessed teacher who enjoins us, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” We find, finally, our home, that place where we truly belong. We find ourselves connected with the Divine and all that is.
~~~
Even with this knowledge – that our true home is in the Infinite – our habitual way of judging, our habitual style of positional thinking creeps in and separates us from the love of God. When, from time to time, we slip into this deep state of non-dual awareness, our old habits slide in right behind it. We begin to think of our awareness as somehow apart from us. That is, we see ourselves as here, but our awareness is somehow over there.
To address this, we need to remember that we inhabit our awareness; it is our home. Our awareness is never something “out there.” Our awareness is the fundamental substrate of our Being. It is never differentiated into parts; it is always a unitive whole.
When I first began exploring this, I would often find myself, at the start of the meditation, feeling that sense of being a whole – that is, a single vibrant being. Very quickly, though, I would slip out of this awareness and back into my habitual way of thinking. I would, once again, go looking for my “awareness” out there someplace, forgetting that it is always something within me. Forgetting that it constitutes the very basis of my being.
As you can imagine, I found this very distressing. And then, in the oddest sort of way, and image came to me which allowed me to release this dualism. (When I have unbidden, unlooked for experiences like this, I have learned to pay close attention to them.) You’ll probably laugh when you hear this, because it is peculiar and perhaps only works for me. I suddenly imagined, during the course of this perceived ‘separation’ from my awareness, that I was swimming underwater in a lake and I shot up from underwater into the very center of the large inner tube. As I came down, I spread my arms out, grasping the inner tube on both sides and feeling whole again. There was a sense of merging with that inner tube and floating freely, safe and secure.
The Second Deepening of Awareness
Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Turn off your cell phone and deal with other potential distractions.
Be seated in a chair, with your spine upright and your feet flat on the floor, cradling your right hand in your left. Don’t cross your legs or ankles, and don’t interlace your fingers because they are likely to fall asleep, which will distract you from your practice.
Close your eyes and focus your attention within your body. Simply observe, and refrain from judging what you experience there.
Notice the flow of your thoughts and emotions. No need to chase after them or elaborate on them. Be receptive to them and just observe.
In this space, your mind will start telling you stories. These stories may focus on your physical sensations, they may focus on some unfinished business you had prior to sitting in meditation, or on any number of other subjects.
Experience these sensations, thoughts, and emotions as they arise in your awareness. Acknowledge them, but don't go chasing after them. Rest your focus in your awareness. Refuse to engage with the distractions. Acknowledge them, and then let them go.
As you release these thoughts and the stories they want to distract you with, notice the progressive deepening that occurs, very gentle and slow at first. As you open to this deepening, as you relinquish your focus on the various ‘objects of awareness,’ you will begin to notice your awareness itself.
As you become aware of your awareness, you may find it a bit slippery – now you have it and then, very quickly, it slips away. You will be tempted to go searching for it or to chase after it.
Instead, return to being aware of your awareness. It is not something apart from you. It is you. Rest here, in your awareness… without running after others things. Let yourself rest in your inner stillness, the stillness that exists underneath the silence. No need for thoughts. No need for words.
Rest in this Stillness without moving for the period of your meditation.
When you are ready, let the feeling come back into your feet, your hands, and your face. Take a deep breath and open your eyes.
I hope you find this deepening a rewarding process. It is designed to move us from our surface perceptions and into the depths of our being. It is here where we realize that our Lord is with us, indeed, he has always been with us. As St. Paul said in his letter to the Romans, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus!” And to that, I say “Amen!”
That’s all for now. Please remember your meditation practice daily. And, in the early part of 2026, we have a special surprise coming. We are working now on a website where we will be able to engage with each other as frequently as you might wish. More on this in the weeks to come.
In the unity of God’s love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
41: Deepening Our Awareness
Edition #41: Inside the Invisible
As I sit here to write this morning, it is Thanksgiving Day. As I reflect on this, I can feel my heart opening, and from this opening a flood of gratitude gushes forth. Gratitude for the opportunity to share the important things in this life with you. Gratitude for each of you who are reading this – my fellow travelers on this great path into ever deepening Awareness. Gratitude that we are each held and cherished in God’s holy Presence.
Have you ever stopped to wonder about the strangeness of our life? I’m not sure I’ll be able to put this into words very clearly, but our daily round – our typical daily experiences – are dualistic. We use positional thinking constantly: this is good, that’s bad, this is right, that’s not, and so on. We divide our actual experience – our felt, lived experience – into parts. This dividing is so natural to us that we never think about it. For us, it is the normal and natural thing to do. On reflection, however, it seems terribly misguided.
We never stop to look at the consequences of our positioning. While we learned positional thinking as infants in order to get along in the world, we didn’t notice the negative consequences that are a necessary part of positioning. We didn’t notice that our positional thinking estranges us from All That Is, from God. That’s a pretty high price to pay, isn’t it! And neither did we notice that our positional thinking is the underlying process that creates all the problems we have either.
~
Let me give you an immediate example of this. I notice sensations in my body on this Thanksgiving morning, sensations that I interpret as a little bit of hunger. From a unitive perspective, this bit of hunger just is. It doesn’t require immediate attention, nor does it require diminishment. In fact, if I were to go get a snack right now, I would have less room for the Thanksgiving feast that will follow this afternoon. But typically, when I feel sensations like these, I run to the kitchen to make them go away.
To be as explicit as possible – I label these sensations as a problem. If I simply accepted them, there would be no problem. But I language these sensations, and in the process, I have created a problem for myself – to eat or not to eat. The dualistic conundrum in a nutshell! If the languaging stopped here, at the domain of thought, it would be bad enough. But no, I have to go and make it worse. I attach my emotions to this wretched algorithm, thereby creating urgency. Now I am starving and I absolutely have to find a snack right NOW. Not only that, but it has to be just the right kind of snack – the very best tasty morsel that I can find.
Do you see the craziness of this? There was no problem initially; there were just some sensations in my belly. But thinking about the sensations made the sensations appear larger and more important than they really were. Connecting my emotions to this thinking process made it appear that it had to be addressed immediately. I started with some ordinary sensations and then blew them up into an urgent problem!
This process happens on a continual basis, every day of our lives. We overlook our actual experiences, which are unitive in nature, and in their place, we substitute dualism. It is extremely hard to recognize this. It is much harder to recognize it on an ongoing basis. But once you start to recognize it, the question then becomes: “How can we overcome our dualism and acquire real spiritual knowledge?”
I hope you recognized the inherent dualism in the question that I just posed above. The assumption is that we are over here, somehow lacking this special thing called “spiritual knowledge,” and that special entity of “spiritual knowledge” is over there somewhere else. To even frame this question, we have to use the dualism inherent in language! So how can we ever get past this?
We get past it when we open our eyes to see what has always been there – the underlying non-dual, unitive experiences that we constantly experience.
~
The most spiritually rewarding perspective is when we come to understand that what we seek is already within us. There is that beautiful saying in the Gospel of Thomas where Jesus says, “The Kingdom is inside you and it is outside you.” That is, the kingdom of God is inside of us and all around us. There is no place that is apart from this kingdom. There is no one who is not cherished by the Divine.
Typically, we overlook our actual unitive experience of the world. As Thomas says, just a little further on in his gospel, “Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.”
~
The most productive attitude for spiritual work is the attitude of receptivity, an attitude of just noticing without feeling compelled to go do something. The typical attitude that people adopt is that they have to go do or get something. This is dualism written large – we are somehow lacking and there is some special thing, some special knowledge, that we must obtain.
Going deeper, the spiritual understandings we are seeking cannot be found. The spiritual understandings we seek are actually self–revealing. They are right in front of us. The more we become aware of the ubiquity of our dualism and positional thinking, the more familiar we become with spiritual principles, the more conversant we are with spiritual disciplines, the more we open ourselves to self–realization.
Why do I say self–realization? Because the kingdom of heaven is not out there, apart from us. The kingdom is within us and we ourselves are situated in the midst of the kingdom. As a result, there is nothing to do. There is no path that we must travel. There is no result that we don’t already have. And it is for this, on this beautiful Thanksgiving morning, that I am most grateful for!
~
In keeping with these ideas, let me introduce you to a way of deepening your meditation from our last newsletter, deepening your awareness. As you explore this, you will find that there is nothing to do. We are moving, in this set of meditations, from doing towards Being.
It’s important to recognize how different this action is, compared to what most of us were taught in church. In church, the message is we need to do things differently; that we are somehow lacking or deficient, and this deficiency needs to be remedied. Briefly, we are sinners and we need to repent from our sinful ways.
This perspective misses what may be the most important aspect of the Christian message. It overlooks that Jesus came from God to us, to open the way of freedom and peace for each of us. He didn’t make us come to him. There were no preconditions put on us. Jesus didn’t say that you had to become sinless in order to receive him. In fact, our Lord spent his time with ordinary people – ordinary husbands and wives, ordinary fishermen, tax collectors, and farmers – in a word, with those who have come to be known by the Church as sinners. He spent his precious time not with the powerful or wealthy. He spent his time with anyone who was open to receive him.
Hear these words because they are so very important. We are not the ones doing the doing; it is our Lord Jesus Christ, who freely comes to us in the midst of our ignorance. The only requirement, if you can even call it that, for those who wish to follow Jesus, is that we open our hearts, to the best of our ability, so that we can receive him.
What this really means is that we cannot go beyond our self-imposed limits – the limits inherent in our judgment and our positional thinking. If we try to rely on our own powers, we are stuck. Trapped in our dualism. Trapped in our reflexive pushing God away.
Our deepening in the spiritual way that Jesus describes, occurs only by opening ourselves to the marvelous grace of God. Our job, in this great endeavor, is to be receptive, because our doing only pushes God away.
Find a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed. Turn off your cell phone and deal with other potential distractions.
Be seated in a chair, with your spine upright and your feet flat on the floor, cradling your right hand in your left. Don’t cross your legs or ankles, and don’t interlace your fingers because they are likely to fall asleep, which will distract you from your practice.
Close your eyes and focus your attention within your body. Simply observe, and refrain from judging what you experience there.
Notice the flow of your thoughts and emotions. No need to chase after them or elaborate on them. Be receptive to them and just observe.
In this space, your mind will start telling you stories. These stories may focus on your physical sensations, they may focus on some unfinished business you had prior to sitting in meditation, or on any number of other subjects.
Experience these sensations, thoughts, and emotions as they arise in your awareness. Acknowledge them, but don't go chasing after them. Rest your focus in your awareness. Refuse to engage with these distractions. Acknowledge them, and then let them go.
As you release these thoughts, and the stories they want to distract you with, notice the progressive deepening that is occurring, very gentle and slow at first. Instead of the noise that’s generated from all of your competing thoughts, you will begin to sense a deepening silence.
As you open to this deepening, as you relinquish your focus on the various ‘objects of awareness,’ you will begin to notice your awareness itself.
As the internal silence grows, you will gradually begin to notice a stillness – a holy Stillness – that exists within the silence. When you sense this, give yourself over to this Stillness; surrender to it. No need for thoughts. No need for words. Rest in this Stillness for the period of your meditation.
Especially at the beginning of this practice, you will find your mind churning through thought after thought, through sensation after sensation. When this occurs, simply release the distraction and move your attention back to your awareness.
Rest here without moving for the period of your meditation.
When you are ready, let the feeling come back into your feet, your hands, and your face. Take a deep breath and open your eyes.
That’s enough for now, I think. I expect that you will find the meditation practice outlined in this newsletter to be very valuable on your inward journey. Please remember to practice daily, if your time permits.
In addition to your daily meditation, I would like to suggest a spiritual discipline that will facilitate your inward journey. Start noticing the many unitive experiences that pervade your daily life. Notice, for example, that there is no such entity as ‘darkness.’ There is only light and its absence. Notice that there is no such entity as cold. There is only heat and its absence. Let yourself become aware of the underlying unity which is both within you, and all around you.
Also, please remember that you are free to contact me if you have any questions about the practices I present or the experiences they yield. I will do my best to address your concerns as time permits. Just email me at ken123kaisch@google.com.
With great thanksgiving for the joy of walking with you,Start writing your email content here...
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me atken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
40: Bridging the Abyss: A Non-dual Meditation
Edition #40: Inside the Invisible
A number of years ago, I stumbled upon the insight that all language is inherently dualistic. What I mean by this is that our language splits the world into subjects and objects. Speaking with a friend from Lithuania, Zilvinas Svigaris, I learned that in the English language, this is especially pronounced. English structures virtually every noun into either a subject or an object. As a result, English speakers grow up with an invisible filter, the filter of dualism.
As a result, our language ends up distorting what we perceive. Let me give you an everyday example. I am eating a delicious avocado half, with the center filled with a great balsamic vinegar. My actual experience is composed of many discrete elements – the mouth-feel of the creamy avocado, the mild green taste of it, the bite of the balsamic, the tart smell of the vinegar, the feel of the metal spoon in my mouth, and so on. To language my experience, I have to break it down into its component parts. However, when I break it into small pieces like this, I distort the experience beyond recognition. The avocado-in-my-mouth does not feel anything like this verbal description. This is clearly a case where the whole is actually greater than the sum of its parts.
My actual experience is a unitive one. All of these constituent parts and more combine and explode in my mouth and nose. All and all, a most pleasant experience!
I believe that we have a great number of these unitive experiences on a daily basis. We don’t notice the unitive quality because we are so quick to divide the experience into subjects and objects. Let me give you another example – one which you have surely had multiple times.
You experience a gorgeous sunset or sunrise. The actual felt experience is, in itself, a unitive one. Your eyes take in the visual splendor, there’s an emotion that rises up in your chest, you feel yourself expanding from being your little, finite self to something enormously huge, even vast. You take in the entire visual space around you, and you feel yourself somehow ‘entering into’ the experience. ‘You’ kind of ‘disappear’ for a long moment as you participate in this glory. The experience, in its unitive form, is beyond breathtaking.
So, what do we do with this experience? You might speak to your companion, “Isn’t that sunset just glorious,” even though you know that your words barely scratch the surface of what you are experiencing. If you happen to have a camera, you probably snap a picture or two, thinking that you have captured the moment. But later, when we look at the snapshot, it is always wanting, somehow less than that glorious unitive experience we have just had.
If I were to ask you, “Which would you prefer – the actual experience of the sunset or a photograph of that same sunset?” I’m sure that you would say you want the actual experience. From some perspectives, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. The actual experience is ephemeral – now it’s here and then, proof it’s gone. The photograph, on the other hand, you can keep forever. It captures the visual experience perfectly, so why would you not prefer the photo? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? The photo captures only a single element of this complex unitive experience. And we, being greedy, want the whole thing!
~
We face a similar set of problems when attempting to deepen our relationship with the Divine through meditation. Our languaging separates us from God. In our minds, we place ourselves right here, but we place God somewhere else, somewhere ‘over there.’ You see the problem, don’t you? Our languaging creates an abyss for which there is no known bridge. What to do?
For years, I have searched for a way to overcome this apparent separation. On the one hand, our scriptures tell us, over and over again, that God is always with us, that the kingdom of heaven dwells inside of us. On the other hand, we rarely seem to experience that holy Presence. How can we address and resolve this apparent dilemma?
Trying to focus and be more precise in this matter, I asked myself, “What is there in the multiplicity of the many aspects of my existence that is already connected with God?” This led me to a question that I should have asked before this one, namely: “How do I know I’m connected with the Divine?” Or perhaps I should ask an even more basic question: “Am I connected with God?”
Considering these questions, a thought came unbidden to mind, one that I found hilarious. How do I know that I’m connected with God? Because (in a child’s singsong voice), “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”
You might wonder what I found hilarious about this. Well, here I am, 77 years old, with four degrees, including an earned doctorate, in two different but complementary fields of study, and with many decades of devoting myself to exploring the spiritual life. With all of the weight of this accumulated knowledge, I go to a child’s faith statement instead of some fancy theological or psychological exposition. It makes me suspect that I may have taken a rather circuitous route to the Divine, rather than the direct one that I would prefer! LOL
When you probe deeper into this faith statement – this description of the connection between God and ourselves – you find something both basic and intrinsically fascinating. The bridge that connects us with the Divine is our awareness.
In fact, it is our awareness that connects us all with one another and with everything that is! But, because our awareness is invisible, we don’t notice it. While we use our awareness every waking moment, we take it for granted. Yet, this element, which exists unnoticed in the background, appears to be the connective tissue that unites all living things.
In addition, our awareness takes us beyond our ordinary human connections and serves as the connecting bridge to the Divine. The invisible part of me – the part that no one can ever see – is my awareness. That same awareness is the vehicle that takes me into that greater Awareness that we conventionally call God. In effect, the invisible part of me is actually the bridge to that invisible being we call the Divine!
Once you understand this, you realize that we have found a way to go beyond the inherent duality that posits me right here and God somewhere else. You realize that we have found a tool – an already existing bridge – that circumvents the illusion of separation.
I have been working with this tool for the last six months in meditation. I have experienced a series of what I call “deepenings.” (I will explore these in future newsletters.) What I would like to do today is to present my findings in the form of a meditation that is both accessible to all and practical.
To utilize this form of meditation, you will find it most helpful to be able to disengage from your thoughts and your thinking mind. This is a skill like any other skill, and it can be learned with sufficient practice. That being said, like many things, it is not particularly easy. Thus, while someone new to meditation may practice this form, it is probably not suitable for everyone, since beginners can experience significant difficulty in focusing on their awareness.
The problem arises, I think, because your awareness is not a static element – it can shift and change quite rapidly. A visual target, such as a simple cross, remains unchanged from one moment to the next. The same applies to an auditory sequence like a mantra. Your awareness, on the other hand, may shift from internal sensations, to a thought about your ‘to-do’ list, to an external sensation like an itch, and so on. It makes sense, then, to practice some of the more focused meditations so that you can learn to hold your focus on this constantly moving target.
That’s enough for now, I think. I expect that you will find the meditation practice outlined in this newsletter to be very valuable on your inward journey. Please remember to practice daily, if your time permits.
Fundamentally, I believe that our intention to draw near to the Divine is the most important element in our lives. It is our intention that pushes us to meditate. It was your intention to draw closer to our Lord that pushed you to read this newsletter and to consider practicing meditation. I see this intention as one of the many gifts that our Lord so freely gives us. We can rejoice because, despite all apparent difficulties, our God is with us and in us!
Also, please remember that you are free to contact me if you have any questions about the practices I present or the experiences they yield. I will do my best to address your concerns as time permits. Just email me at ken123kaisch@google.com.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
P.P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇